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THE MODERN LIBRARY

OF THE WORLD'S BEST BOOKS

ARROWSMITH

"» \*uaum JB

The publishers will be pleased to send, upon request, an
illustrated folder setting forth the purpose and scope of
THE modern library, and listing each volume
in the series. Every reader of books will find titles he has
been looking for, handsomely printed, in unabridged
editions, and at an unusually low price.

Arrowsmith

BY

Sinclair Lewis

THE

MODERN LIBRARY

NEW YORK

ifv^

/

COPYRIGHT, 1925, BY HARCOURT, BRACE & CO., INC,

COPYRIGHT, 1924, 1925,
BY THE DBSIGNER PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC

_^g^y!ik«»iwiifa

Random House is the

PUBL I S HE R OF

THE MODERN

LIBRARY

BENNETT A. CBRF • DONALD S. KLOPFER • ROBERT K. HAAS

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed by Parkway Printing Company

Bound by H. Wolff

To Dr. Paul H. de Kruif I am indebted not only
for most of the bacteriological ana medical ma-
terial in this tale but equally for his help in the
planning of the fable itself — for his realization of
the characters as living people, for his philosophy
as a scientist. With this acknowledgment I want
to record our months of companionship while
wording on the boo\, in the United States, in the
West Indies, in Panama, in London and Fontaine-
bleau. I wish I could reproduce our tal\s along
the way, and the laboratory afternoons, the restau-
rants at night, and the dec\ at dawn as we steamed
into tropic ports.

SINCLAIR LEWIS

ARROWSMITH

CHAPTER I

THE driver of the wagon swaying through forest and
swamp of the Ohio wilderness was a ragged girl of four-
teen. Her mother they had buried near the Monongahela
— the girl herself had heaped with torn sods the grave beside
the river of the beautiful name. Her father lay shrinking with
fever on the floor of the wagon-box, and about him played her
brothers and sisters, dirty brats, tattered brats, hilarious brats.

She halted at the fork in the grassy road, and the sick man
quavered, "Emmy, ye better turn down towards Cincinnati. If
we could find your Uncle Ed, I guess he'd take us in."

"Nobody ain't going to take us in," she said. "We're going on
jus' long as we can. Going West! They's a whole lot of new
things I aim to be seeing!"

She cooked the supper, she put the children to bed, and sat
by the fire, alone.

That was the great-grandmother of Martin Arrowsmith.

ii

Cross-legged in the examining-chair in Doc Vickerson's office,
a boy was reading "Gray's Anatomy." His name was Martin
Arrowsmith, of Elk Mills, in the state of Winnemac.

There was a suspicion in Elk Mills — now, in 1897, a dowdy
red-brick village, smelling of apples — that this brown-leather ad-
justable seat which Doc Vickerson used for minor operations,
for the infrequent pulling of teeth and for highly frequent naps,
had begun life as a barber's chair. There was also a belief that
its proprietor must once have been called Doctor Vickerson, but
for years he had been only The Doc, and he was scurfier and
much less adjustable than the chair.

Martin was the son of J. J. Arrowsmith, who conducted the
New York Clothing Bazaar. By sheer brass and obstinacy he
had, at fourteen, become the unofficial, also decidedly unpaid,
assistant to the Doc, and while the Doc was on a country call
he took charge — though what there was to take charge of, no
one could ever make out. He was a slender boy, not very tall;
his hair and restless eyes were black, his skin unusually white,
and the contrast gave him an air of passionate variability. The
squareness of his head and a reasonable breadth of shoulders
saved him from any appearance of effeminacy or of that quer-
ulous timidity which artistic young gentlemen call Sensitiveness.
When he lifted his head to listen, his right eyebrow, slightly
higher than the left, rose and quivered in his characteristic ex-
pression of energy, of independence, and a hint that he could
fight, a look of impertinent inquiry which had been known to
annoy his teachers and the Sunday School superintendent.

Martin was, like most inhabitants of Elk Mills before the
Slavo-Italian immigration, a Typical Pure-bred Anglo-Saxon
American, which means that he was a union of German, French,
Scotch, Irish, perhaps a little Spanish, conceivably a little of
the strains lumped together as "Jewish," and a great deal of
English, which is itself a combination of Primitive Britain, Celt,
Phoenician, Roman, German, Dane, and Swede.

It is not certain that, in attaching himself to Doc Vickerson,
Martin was entirely and edifyingly controlled by a desire to be-
come a Great Healer. He did awe his Gang by bandaging stone-
bruises, dissecting squirrels, and explaining the astounding and
secret matters to be discovered at the back of the physiology, but
he was not completely free from an ambition to command such
glory among them as was enjoyed by the son of the Episcopalian
minister, who could smoke an entire cigar without becoming
sick. Yet this afternoon he read steadily at the section on the
lymphatic system, and he muttered the long and perfectly in-
comprehensible words in a hum which made drowsier the dusty
room.

It was the central room of the three occupied by Doc Vicker-
son, facing on Main Street above the New York Clothing
Bazaar. On one side of it was the foul waiting-room, on the
other, the Doc's bedroom. He was an aged widower; for what
he called "female fixings" he cared nothing; and the bedroom

4

with its tottering bureau and its cot of frowsy blankets was
cleaned only by Martin, in not very frequent attacks of sani-
tation.

This central room was at once business office, consultation-
room, operating-theater, living-room, poker den, and warehouse
for guns and fishing-tackle. Against a brown plaster wall was a
cabinet of zoological collections and medical curiosities, and
beside it the most dreadful and fascinating object known to the
boy-world of Elk Mills — a skeleton with one gaunt gold tooth.
On evenings when the Doc was away, Martin would acquire
prestige among the trembling Gang by leading them into the
unutterable darkness and scratching a sulfur match on the skele-
ton's jaw.

On the wall was a home-stuffed pickerel on a home-varnished
board. Beside the rusty stove, a sawdust-box cuspidor rested on
a slimy oilcloth worn through to the threads. On the senile
table was a pile of memoranda of debts which the Doc was
always swearing he would "collect from those dead-beats right
now," and which he would never, by any chance, at any time,
collect from any of them. A year or two — a decade or two — a
century or two — they were all the same to the plodding doctor
in the bee-murmuring town.

The most unsanitary corner was devoted to the cast-iron sink,
which was oftener used for washing eggy breakfast plates than
for sterilizing instruments. On its ledge were a broken test-tube,
a broken fishhook, an unlabeled and forgotten bottle of pills, a
nail-bristling heel, a frayed cigar-butt, and a rusty lancet stuck
in a potato.

The wild raggedness of the room was the soul and symbol of
Doc Vickerson; it was more exciting than the flat-faced stack
of shoe-boxes in the New York Bazaar: it was the lure to ques-
tioning and adventure for Martin Arrowsmith.

in

The boy raised his head, cocked his inquisitive brow. On the
stairway was the cumbersome step of Doc Vickerson. The Doc
was sober! Martin would not have to help him into bed.

But it was a bad sign that the Doc should first go down the
hall to his bedroom. The boy listened sharply. He heard the

5

Doc open the lower part of the washstand, where he kept his
bottle of Jamaica rum. After a long gurgle the invisible Doc
put away the bottle and decisively kicked the doors shut. Still
good. Only one drink. If he came into the consultation-room
at once, he would be safe. But he was still standing in the bed-
room. Martin sighed as the washstand doors were hastily opened
again, as he heard another gurgle and a third.

The Doc's step was much livelier when he loomed into the
office, a gray mass of a man with a gray mass of mustache, a
form vast and unreal and undefined, like a cloud taking for the
moment a likeness of humanity. With the brisk attack of one
who wishes to escape the discussion of his guilt, the Doc rum-
bled while he waddled toward his desk-chair:

"What you doing here, young fella? What you doing here?
I knew the cat would drag in something if I left the door un-
locked." He gulped slightly; he smiled to show that he was
being humorous — people had been known to misconstrue the
Doc's humor.

He spoke more seriously, occasionally forgetting what he was
talking about:

"Reading old Gray? That's right. Physician's library just three
books: 'Gray's Anatomy' and Bible and Shakespeare. Study.
You may become great doctor. Locate in Zenith and make five
thousand dollars year — much as United States Senator! Set a
high goal. Don't let things slide. Get training. Go college before
go medical school. Study. Chemistry. Latin. Knowledge! I'm
plug doc — got chick nor child — nobody — old drunk. But you —
leadin' physician. Make five thousand dollars year.

"Murray woman's got endocarditis. Not thing I can do for her.
Wants somebody hold her hand. Road's damn' disgrace. Cul-
vert's out, beyond the grove. 'Sgrace.

"Endocarditis and —

"Training, that's what you got t' get. Fundamentals. Know
chemistry. Biology. I nev' did. Mrs. Reverend Jones thinks she's
got gastric ulcer. Wants to go city for operation. Ulcer, hell!
She and the Reverend both eat too much.

"Why they don't repair that culvert — And don't be a booze-
hoister like me, either. And get your basic science. I'll splain."

The boy, normal village youngster though he was, given to

stoning cats and to playing pom-pom-pullaway, gained some-
thing of the intoxication of treasure-hunting as the Doc strug-
gled to convey his vision of the pride of learning, the universal-
ity of biology, the triumphant exactness of chemistry. A fat old
man and dirty and unvirtuous was the Doc; his grammar was
doubtful, his vocabulary alarming, and his references to his rival,
good Dr. Needham, were scandalous; yet he invoked in Martin
a vision of making chemicals explode with much noise and
stink and of seeing animalcules that no boy in Elk Mills had
ever beheld.

The Doc's voice was thickening; he was sunk in his chair,
blurry of eye and lax of mouth. Martin begged him to go to
bed, but the Doc insisted:

"Don't need nap. No. Now you lissen. You don't appreciate
but — Old man now. Giving you all I've learned. Show you
collection. Only museum in whole county. Scientif pioneer."

A hundred times had Martin obediently looked at the speci-
mens in the brown, crackly-varnished bookcase: the beetles and
chunks of mica; the embryo of a two-headed calf, the gallstones
removed from a respectable lady whom the Doc enthusiastically
named to all visitors. The Doc stood before the case, waving an
enormous but shaky forefinger.

"Looka that butterfly. Name is porthesia chrysorrhoea. Doc
Needham couldn't tell you that! He don't know what butterflies
are called! He don't care if you get trained. Remember that
name now?" He turned on Martin. "You payin' attention? You
interested? Huh? Oh, the devil! Nobody wants to know about
my museum — not a person. Only one in county but — I'm an old
failure."

Martin asserted, "Honest, it's slick!"

"Look here! Look here! See that? In the bottle? It's an
appendix. First one ever took out 'round here. I did it! Old
Doc Vickerson, he did the first 'pendectomy in this neck of the
woods, you bet! And first museum. It ain't — so big — but it's
start. I haven't put away money like Doc Needham, but I
started first election — I started it!"

He collapsed in a chair, groaning, "You're right. Got to sleep.
All in." But as Martin helped him to his feet he broke away,
scrabbled about on his desk, and looked back doubtfully. "Want

to give you something— start your training. And remember the
old man. Will anybody remember the old man?"

He was holding out the beloved magnifying glass which for
years he had used in botanizing. He watched Martin slip the
lens into his pocket, he sighed, he struggled for something else
to say, and silently he lumbered into his bedroom.

CHAPTER If

THE state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio,
Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half
Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its
brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition
which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the largest
city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Mid-
western in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos,
and, despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties
were not settled till i860.

The University of Winnemac is at Mohalis, fifteen miles from
Zenith. There are twelve thousand students; beside this prodigy
Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a select college
for young gentlemen. The University has a baseball field under
glass; its buildings are measured by the mile; it hires hundreds
of young Doctors of Philosophy to give rapid instruction in
Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle-fitting, sanitary engi-
neering, Provencal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing,
motor-car designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Mat-
thew Arnold, the diagnosis of myohypertrophia \ymoparalytica,
and department-store advertising. Its president is the best money-
raiser and the best after-dinner speaker in the United States;
and Winnemac was the first school in the world to conduct its
extension courses by radio.

It is not a snobbish rich-man's college, devoted to leisurely
nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what
they want — or what they are told they want — is a mill to turn
out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge,
drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally
mention books, though they are not expected to have time to
read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle

a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly inter-
changeable parts. Hourly the University of Winnemac grows in
numbers and influence, and by 1950 one may expect it to have
created an entirely new world-civilization, a civilization larger
and brisker and purer.

11

In 1904, when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science
Junior preparing for medical school, Winnemac had but five
thousand students yet it was already brisk.

Martin was twenty-one. He still seemed pale, in contrast to
his black smooth hair, but he was a respectable runner, a fair
basket-ball center, and a savage hockey-player. The co-eds mur-
mured that he "looked so romantic," but as this was before the
invention of sex and the era of petting-parties, they merely talked
about him at a distance, and he did not know that he could
have been a hero of amours. For all his stubbornness he was shy.
He was not entirely ignorant of caresses but he did not make an
occupation of them. He consorted with men whose virile pride
it was to smoke filthy corncob pipes and to wear filthy sweaters.

The University had become his world. For him Elk Mills did
not exist. Doc Vickerson was dead and buried and forgotten;
Martin's father and mother were dead, leaving him only enough
money for his arts and medical courses. The purpose of life
was chemistry and physics and the prospect of biology next year.

His idol was Professor Edward Edwards, head of the depart-
ment of chemistry, who was universally known as "Encore."
Edwards' knowledge of the history of chemistry was immense.
He could read Arabic, and he infuriated his fellow chemists by
asserting that the Arabs had anticipated all their researches.
Himself, Professor Edwards never did researches. He sat before
fires and stroked his collie and chuckled in his beard.

This evening Encore was giving one of his small and popular
At Home's. He lolled in a brown-corduroy Morris chair, being
quietly humorous for the benefit of Martin and half a dozen
other fanatical young chemists, and baiting Dr. Norman Brum-
fit, the instructor in English. The room was full of heartiness
and beer and Brumfit.

Every university faculty must have a Wild Man to provide
thrills and to shock crowded lecture-rooms. Even in so energeti-

10

cally virtuous an institution as Winnemac there was one Wild
Man, and he was Norman Brumfit. He was permitted, without
restriction, to speak of himself as immoral, agnostic and social-
istic, so long as it was universally known that he remained pure,
Presbyterian, and Republican. Dr. Brumfit was in form, tonight.
He asserted that whenever a man showed genius, it could be
proved that he had Jewish blood. Like all discussions of Judaism
at Winnemac, this led to the mention of Max Gottlieb, profes-
sor of bacteriology in the medical school.

Professor Gottlieb was the mystery of the University. It was
known that he was a Jew, born and educated in Germany, and
that his work on immunology had given him fame in the East
and in Europe. He rarely left his small brown weedy house
except to return to his laboratory, and few students outside of
his classes had ever identified him, but everyone had heard of
his tall, lean, dark aloofness. A thousand fables fluttered about
him. It was believed that he was the son of a German prince,
that he had immense wealth, that he lived as sparsely as the other
professors only because he was doing terrifying and costly ex-
periments which probably had something to do with human
sacrifice. It was said that he could create life in the laboratory,
that he could talk to the monkeys which he inoculated, that he
had been driven out of Germany as a devil-worshiper or an
anarchist, and that he secretly drank real champagne every eve-
ning at dinner.

It was the tradition that faculty-members did not discuss their
colleagues with students, but Max Gottlieb could not be re-
garded as anybody's colleague. He was impersonal as the chill
northeast wind. Dr. Brumfit rattled:

"I'm sufficiently liberal, I should assume, toward the claims
of science, but with a man like Gottlieb — I'm prepared to be-
lieve that he knows all about material forces, but what astounds
me is that such a man can be blind to the vital force that creates
all others. He says that knowledge is worthless unless it is proven
by rows of figures. Well, when one of you scientific sharks can
take the genius of a Ben Jonson and measure it with a yard-
stick, then I'll admit that we literary chaps, with our doubtless
absurd belief in beauty and loyalty and the world o' dreams, are
off on the wrong track!"

Martin Arrowsmith was not exactly certain what this meant

II

and he enthusiastically did not care. He was relieved when Pro-
fessor Edwards from the midst of his beardedness and smokiness
made a sound curiously like "Oh, hell!" and took the conversa-
tion away from Brumfit. Ordinarily Encore would have sug-
gested, with amiable malice, that Gottlieb was a "crapehanger"
who wasted time destroying the theories of other men instead of
making new ones of his own. But tonight, in detestation of such
literary playboys as Brumfit, he exalted Gottlieb's long, lonely,
failure-burdened effort to synthesize antitoxin, and his diabolic
pleasure in disproving his own contentions as he would those of
Ehrlich or Sir Almroth Wright. He spoke of Gottlieb's great
book, "Immunology," which had been read by seven-ninths of
all the men in the world who could possibly understand it —
the number of these being nine.

The party ended with Mrs. Edwards' celebrated doughnuts.
Martin tramped toward his boarding-house through a veiled
spring night. The discussion of Gottlieb had roused him to a
reasonless excitement. He thought of working in a laboratory
at night, alone, absorbed, contemptuous of academic success and
of popular classes. Himself, he believed, he had never seen the
man, but he knew that Gottlieb's laboratory was in the Main
Medical Building. He drifted toward the distant medical campus.
The few people whom he met were hurrying with midnight
timidity. He entered the shadow of the Anatomy Building, grim
as a barracks, still as the dead men lying up there in the dissect-
ing-room. Beyond him was the turreted bulk of the Main Medi-
cal Building, a harsh and blurry mass, high up in its dark wall
a single light. He started. The light had gone out abruptly, as
though an agitated watcher were trying to hide from him.

On the stone steps of the Main Medical, two minutes after,
appeared beneath the arc-light a tall figure, ascetic, self-contained,
apart. His swart cheeks were gaunt, his nose high-bridged and
thin. He did not hurry, like the belated home-bodies. He was
unconscious of the world. He looked at Martin and through
him; he moved away, muttering to himself, his shoulders
stooped, his long hands clasped behind him. He was lost in the
shadows, himself a shadow.

He had worn the threadbare top-coat of a poor professor, yet
Martin remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape with
a silver star arrogant on his breast.

12

X III

On his first day in medical school, Martin Arrowsmith was
.in a high state of superiority. As a medic he was more pic-
turesque than other students, for medics are reputed to know
secrets, horrors, exhilarating wickednesses. Men from the other
departments go to their rooms to peer into their books. But also
as an academic graduate, with a training in the basic sciences,
he felt superior to his fellow medics, most of whom had but a
high-school diploma, with perhaps one year in a ten-room
Lutheran college among the cornfields.

For all his pride, Martin was nervous. He thought of operat-
ing, of making a murderous wrong incision; and with a more
immediate, macabre fear, he thought of the dissecting-room and
the stony, steely Anatomy Building. He had heard older medics
mutter of its horrors: of corpses hanging by hooks, like rows of
ghastly fruit, in an abominable tank of brine in the dark base-
ment; of Henry the janitor, who was said to haul the cadavers
out of the brine, to inject red lead into their veins, and to scold
them as he stuffed them on the dumb-waiter.

There was prairie freshness in the autumn day but Martin
did not heed. He hurried into the slate-colored hall of the Main
Medical, up the wide stairs to the office of Max Gottlieb. He did
not look at passing students, and when he bumped into them he
grunted in confused apology. It was a portentous hour. He was
going to specialize in bacteriology; he was going to discover
enchanting new germs; Professor Gottlieb was going to recog-
nize him as a genius, make him an assistant, predict for him —
He halted in Gottlieb's private laboratory, a small, tidy apart-
ment with racks of cotton-corked test-tubes on the bench, a
place unimpressive and unmagical save for the constant-tempera-
ture bath with its tricky thermometer and electric bulbs. He
waited till another student, a stuttering gawk of a student, had
finished talking to Gottlieb, dark, lean, impassive at his desk in
a cubbyhole of an office, then he plunged.

If in the misty April night Gottlieb had been romantic as a
cloaked horseman, he was now testy and middle-aged. Near at
hand, Martin could see wrinkles beside the hawk eyes. Gottlieb
had turned back to his desk, which was heaped with shabby
note-books, sheets of calculations, and a marvelously precise

13

chart with red and green curves descending to vanish at zero.
The calculations were delicate, minute, exquisitely clear; and
delicate were the scientist's thin hands among the papers. He
looked up, spoke with a hint of German accent. His words were
not so much mispronounced as colored with a warm unfamiliar
tint.

"Veil? Yes?"

"Oh, Professor Gottlieb, my name is Arrowsmith. I'm a medic
freshman, Winnemac B.A. I'd like awfully to take bacteriology
this fall instead of next year. I've had a lot of chemistry — "

"No. It is not time for you."

"Honest, I know I could do it now."

"There are two kinds of students that the gods give me. One
kind they dump on me like a bushel of potatoes. I do not like
potatoes, and the potatoes they do not ever seem to have great
affection for me, but I take them and teach them to kill patients.
The other kind — they are very few! — they seem for some reason
that is not at all clear to me to wish a liddle bit to become sci-
entists, to work with bugs and make mistakes. Those, ah, those,
I seize them, I denounce them, I teach them right away the ulti-
mate lesson of science, which is to wait and doubt. Of the po-
tatoes, I demand nothing; of the foolish ones like you, who
think I could teach them something, I demand everything. No.
You are too young. Come back next year."

"But honestly, with my chemistry — "

"Have you taken physical chemistry?"

"No, sir, but I did pretty well in organic."

"Organic chemistry! Puzzle chemistry! Stink chemistry! Drug-
store chemistry! Physical chemistry is power, it is exactness, it
is life. But organic chemistry — that is a trade for pot-washers.
No. You are too young. Come back in a year."

Gottlieb was absolute. His talon fingers waved Martin to the
door, and the boy hastened out, not daring to argue. He slunk
off in misery. On the campus he met that jovial historian of
chemistry, Encore Edwards, and begged, "Say, Professor, tell me,
is there any value for a doctor in organic chemistry?"

"Value? Why, it seeks the drugs that allay pain! It produces
the paint that slicks up your house, it dyes your sweetheart's
dress — and maybe, in these degenerate days, her cherry lips!

Who the dickens has been talking scandal about my organic
chemistry?"

"Nobody. I was just wondering," Martin complained, and he
drifted to the College Inn where, in an injured and melancholy
manner, he devoured an enormous banana-split and a bar of
almond chocolate, as he meditated:

"I want to take bacteriology. I want to get down to the bottom
of this disease stuff. I'll learn some physical chemistry. I'll show
old Gottlieb, damn him! Some day I'll discover the germ of
cancer or something, and then he'll look foolish in the face! . . .
Oh, Lord, I hope I won't take sick, first time I go into the dis-
secting-room. ... I want to take bacteriology — now!"

He recalled Gottlieb's sardonic face; he felt and feared his
quality of dynamic hatred. Then he remembered the wrinkles,
and he saw Max Gottlieb not as a genius but as a man who had
headaches, who became agonizingly tired, who could be loved.

"I wonder if Encore Edwards knows as much as I thought
he did? What is Truth?" he puzzled.

IV

Martin was jumpy on his first day of dissecting. He could
not look at the inhumanly stiff faces of the starveling gray men
lying on the wooden tables. But they were so impersonal, these
lost old men, that in two days he was, like the other medics,
calling them "Billy" and "Ike" and "the Parson," and regarding
them as he had regarded animals in biology. The dissecting-
room itself was impersonal: hard cement floor, walls of hard
plaster between wire-glass windows. Martin detested the reek
of formaldehyde; that and some dreadful subtle other odor
seemed to cling about him outside the dissecting-room; but he
smoked cigarettes to forget it, and in a week he was exploring
arteries with youthful and altogether unholy joy.

His dissecting partner was the Reverend Ira Hinkley, known
to the class by a similar but different name.

Ira was going to be a medical missionary. He was a man of
twenty-nine, a graduate of Pottsburg Christian College and of
the Sanctification Bible and Missions School. He had played
football; he was as strong and nearly as large as a steer, and no
steer ever bellowed more enormously. He was a bright and

15

happy Christian, a romping optimist who laughed away sin and
doubt, a joyful Puritan who with annoying virility preached the
doctrine of his tiny sect, the Sanctification Brotherhood, that to
have a beautiful church was almost as damnable as the de-
baucheries of card-playing.

Martin found himself viewing "Billy," their cadaver — an un-
dersized, blotchy old man with a horrible little red beard on his
petrified, vealy face — as a machine, fascinating, complex, beauti-
ful, but a machine. It damaged his already feeble belief in man's
divinity and immortality. He might have kept his doubts to
himself, revolving them slowly as he dissected out the nerves
of the mangled upper arm, but Ira Hinkley would not let him
alone. Ira believed that he could bring even medical students to
bliss, which, to Ira, meant singing extraordinarily long and un-
lovely hymns in a chapel of the Sanctification Brotherhood.

"Mart, my son," he roared, "do you realize that in this, what
some might call a sordid task, we are learning things that will
enable us to heal the bodies and comfort the souls of countless
lost unhappy folks?"

"Huh! Souls. I haven't found one yet in old Billy. Honest, do
you believe that junk?"

Ira clenched his fist and scowled, then belched with laugh-
ter, slapped Martin distressingly on the back, and clamored,
"Brother, you've got to do better than that to get Ira's goat!
You think you've got a lot of these fancy Modern Doubts. You
haven't — you've only got indigestion. What you need is exercise
and faith. Come on over to the Y.M.C.A. and I'll take you for
a swim and pray with you. Why, you poor skinny little agnostic,
here you have a chance to see the Almighty's handiwork, and all
you grab out of it is a feeling that you're real smart. Buck up,
young Arrowsmith. You don't know how funny you are, to a
fellow that's got a serene faith!"

To the delight of Clif Clawson, the class jester, who worked
at the next table, Ira chucked Martin in the ribs, patted him,
very painfully, upon the head, and amiably resumed work, while
Martin danced with irritation.

16

In college Martin had been a "barb" — he had not belonged to
a Greek Letter secret society. He had been "rushed," but he had
resented the condescension of the aristocracy of men from the
larger cities. Now that most of his Arts classmates had departed
to insurance offices, law schools, and banks, he was lonely, and
tempted by an invitation from Digamma Pi, the chief medical
fraternity.

Digamma Pi was a lively boarding-house with a billiard table
and low prices. Rough and amiable noises came from it at night,
and a good deal of singing about When I Die Don't Bury Me
at All; yet for three years Digams had won the valedictory and
the Hugh Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery. This autumn
the Digams elected Ira Hinkley, because they had been gaining
a reputation for dissipation — girls were said to have been
smuggled in late at night — and no company which included
the Reverend Mr. Hinkley could possibly be taken by the Dean
as immoral, which was an advantage if they were to continue
comfortably immoral.

Martin had prized the independence of his solitary room. In
a fraternity, all tennis rackets, trousers, and opinions are held in
common. When Ira found that Martin was hesitating, he in-
sisted, "Oh, come on in! Digam needs you. You do study hard —
I'll say that for you — and think what a chance you'll have to
influence The Fellows for good."

(On all occasions, Ira referred to his classmates as The Fel-
lows, and frequently he used the term in prayers at the
Y.M.C.A.)

"I don't want to influence anybody. I want to learn the doctor
trade and make six thousand dollars a year."

"My boy, if you only knew how foolish you sound when you
try to be cynical! When you're as old as I am, you'll understand
that the glory of being a doctor is that you can teach folks high
ideals while you soothe their tortured bodies."

"Suppose they don't want my particular brand of high ideals?"

"Mart, have I got to stop and pray with you?"

"No! Quit! Honestly, Hinkley, of all the Christians I ever met
you take the rottenest advantages. You can lick anybody in the
class, and when I think of how you're going to bully the poor

17

heathen when you get to be a missionary, and make the kids
put on breeches, and marry off all the happy lovers to the wrong
people, I could bawl!"

The prospect of leaving his sheltered den for the patronage
of the Reverend Mr. Hinkley was intolerable. It was not till
Angus Duer accepted election to Digamma Pi that Martin him-
self came in.

Duer was one of the few among Martin's classmates in the
academic course who had gone on with him to the Winnemac
medical school. Duer had been the valedictorian. He was a
silent, sharp-faced, curly-headed, rather handsome young man,
and he never squandered an hour or a good impulse. So brilliant
was his work in biology and chemistry that a Chicago surgeon
had promised him a place in his clinic. Martin compared Angus
Duer to a razor blade on a January morning; he hated him, was
uncomfortable with him, and envied him. He knew that in
biology Duer had been too busy passing examinations to ponder,
to get any concept of biology as a whole. He knew that Duer
was a tricky chemist, who neatly and swiftly completed the ex-
periments demanded by the course and never ventured on orig-
inal experiments which, leading him into a confused land of
wondering, might bring him to glory or disaster. He was sure
that Duer cultivated his manner of chill efficiency to impress
instructors. Yet the man stood out so bleakly from a mass of
students who could neither complete their experiments nor
ponder nor do anything save smoke pipes and watch football-
practice that Martin loved him while he hated him, and almost
meekly he followed him into Digamma Pi.

Martin, Ira Hinkley, Angus Duer, Clif Clawson, the meaty
class jester, and one "Fatty" Pfaff were initiated into Digamma
Pi together. It was a noisy and rather painful performance,
which included smelling asafetida. Martin was bored, but Fatty
PfafT was in squeaking, billowing, gasping terror.

Fatty was of all the new Freshmen candidates the most useful
to Digamma Pi. He was planned by nature to be a butt. He
looked like a distended hot-water bottle; he was magnificently
imbecile; he believed everything, he knew nothing, he could
memorize nothing; and anxiously he forgave the men who got
through the vacant hours by playing jokes upon him. They
persuaded him that mustard plasters were excellent for colds—

18

solicitously they gathered about him, affixed an enormous plaster
to his back, and afterward fondly removed it. They concealed
the ear of a cadaver in his nice, clean, new pocket handkerchief
when he went to Sunday supper at the house of a girl cousin in
Zenith. ... At supper he produced the handkerchief with a
flourish.

Every night when Fatty retired he had to remove from his
bed a collection of objects which thoughtful house-mates had
stuffed between the sheets — soap, alarm clocks, fish. He was
the perfect person to whom to sell useless things. Clif Clawson,
who combined a brisk huckstering with his jokes, sold to Fatty
for four dollars a History of Medicine which he had bought,
second-hand, for two, and while Fatty never read it, never
conceivably could read it, the possession of the fat red book
made him feel learned. But Fatty's greatest beneficence to Di-
gamma was his belief in spiritualism. He went about in terror
of spooks. He was always seeing them emerging at night from
the dissecting-room windows. His classmates took care that he
should behold a great many of them flitting about the halls of
the fraternity.

VI

Digamma Pi was housed in a residence built in the expansive
days of 1885. The living-room suggested a recent cyclone. Knife-
gashed tables, broken Morris chairs, and torn rugs were flung
about the room, and covered with backless books, hockey shoes,
caps, and cigarette stubs.. Above, there were four men to a bed-
room, and the beds were iron double-deckers, like a steerage.

For ash-trays the Digams used sawed skulls, and on the bed-
room walls were anatomical charts, to be studied while dressing.
In Martin's room was a complete skeleton. He and his room-
mates had trustingly bought it from a salesman who came out
from a Zenith surgical supply house. He was such a genial and
sympathetic salesman; he gave them cigars and told G. U. stories
and explained what prosperous doctors they were all going to
be. They bought the skeleton gratefully, on the installment
plan. . . . Later the salesman was less genial.

Martin roomed with Clif Clawson, Fatty Pfaff, and an earnest
second-year medic named Irving Watters.

Any psychologist desiring a perfectly normal man for use in

19

demonstrations could not have done better than to have engaged
Irving Watters. He was always and carefully dull; smilingly,
easily, dependably dull. If there was any cliche which he did not
use, it was because he had not yet heard it. He believed in mor-
ality— except on Saturday evenings; he believed in the Episco-
pal Church — but not the High Church; he believed in the Con-
stitution, Darwinism, systematic exercise in the gymnasium, and
the genius of the president of the university.

Among them, Martin most liked Clif Clawson. Clif was the
clown of the fraternity-house, he was given to raucous laughter,
he clogged and sang meaningless songs, he even practiced on
the cornet, yet he was somehow a good fellow and solid, and
Martin, in his detestation of Ira Hinkley, his fear of Angus
Duer, his pity for Fatty PfafT, his distaste for the amiable dull-
ness of Irving Watters, turned to the roaring Clif as to some-
thing living and experimenting. At least Clif had reality; the
reality of a plowed field, of a steaming manure-pile. It was Clif
who would box with him; Clif who — though he loved to sit for
hours smoking, grunting, magnificently loafing — could be per-
suaded to go for a five-mile walk.

And it was Clif who risked death by throwing baked beans
at the Reverend Ira Hinkley at supper, when Ira was bulkily
and sweetly corrective.

In the dissecting-room Ira was maddening enough with his
merriment at such of Martin's ideas as had not been accepted
in Pottsburg Christian College, but in the fraternity-house he
was a moral pest. He never ceased trying to stop their profanity.
After three years on a backwoods football team he still believed
with unflinching optimism that he could sterilize young men
by administering reproofs, with the nickering of a lady Sunday
School teacher and the delicacy of a charging elephant.

Ira also had statistics about Clean Living.

He was full of statistics. Where he got them did not matter
to him; figures in the daily papers, in the census report, or in
the Miscellany Column of the Sanctification Herald were equally
valid. He announced at supper table, "Clif, it's a wonder to me
how as bright a fella as you can go on sucking that dirty old
pipe. D'you realize that 67.9 per cent of all women who go to
the operating table have husbands who smoke tobacco?"

"What the devil would they smoke?" demanded Clif.

20

"Where'd you get those figures?" from Martin.

"They came out at a medical convention in Philadelphia in
1902," Ira condescended. "Of course I don't suppose it'll make
any difference to a bunch of wise galoots like you that some day
you'll marry a nice bright little woman and ruin her life with
your vices. Sure, keep right on — fine brave virile bunch! A poor
#eakling preacher like me wouldn't dare do anything so brave
as smoke a pipe!"

He left them triumphantly, and Martin groaned, "Ira makes
me want to get out of medicine and be an honest harness
maker."

"Aw, gee now, Mart," Fatty Pfaff complained, "you oughtn't
to cuss Ira out. He's awful sincere."

"Sincere? Hell! So is a cockroach!"

Thus they jabbered, while Angus Duer watched them in a
superior silence that made Martin nervous. In the study of the
profession to which he had looked forward all his life he found
irritation and vacuity as well as serene wisdom; he saw no one
clear path to Truth but a thousand paths to a thousand truths
far-off and doubtful.

2$

CHAPTER III

JOHN A. ROBERTSHAW, John Aldington Robertshaw,
professor of physiology in the medical school, was rather
deaf, and he was the only teacher in the University of Win-
nemac who still wore mutton-chop whiskers. He came from
Back Bay; he was proud of it and let you know about it. With
three other Brahmins he formed in Mohalis a Boston colony
which stood for sturdy sweetness and decorously shaded light.
On all occasions he remarked, "When I was studying with Lud-
wig in Germany — " He was too absorbed in his own correctness
to heed individual students, and^ Clif Clawson and the other
young men technically known as "hell-raisers" looked forward
to his lectures on physiology.

They were held in an amphitheater whose seats curved so far
around that the lecturer could not see both ends at once, and
while Dr. Robertshaw, continuing to drone about blood circula-
tion, was peering to the right to find out who was making that
outrageous sound like a motor horn, far over on the left Clif
Clawson would rise and imitate him, with sawing arm and
stroking of imaginary whiskers. Once Clif produced the master-
piece of throwing a brick into the sink beside the platform, just
when Dr. Robertshaw was working up to his annual climax
about the effect of brass bands on the intensity of the knee-jerk.

Martin had been reading Max Gottlieb's scientific papers — as
much of them as he could read, with their morass of mathemati-
cal symbols — and from them he had a conviction that experi-
ments should be something dealing with the foundations of life
and death, with the nature of bacterial infection, with the chem-
istry of bodily reactions. When Robertshaw chirped about fussy
little experiments, standard experiments, maiden-aunt experi-
ments, Martin was restless. In college he had felt that prosody

22

and Latin Composition were futile, and he had looked'forward
to the study of medicine as illumination. Now, in melancholy
worry about his own unreasonableness, he found that he was
developing the same contempt for Robertshaw's rules of the
thumb — and for most of the work in anatomy.

The professor of anatomy, Dr. Oliver O. Stout, was himself
an anatomy, a dissection-chart, a thinly covered knot of nerves
and blood vessels and bones. Stout had precise and enormous
knowledge; in his dry voice he could repeat more facts about
the left little toe than you would have thought anybody would
care to learn regarding the left little toe.

No discussion at the Digamma Pi supper table was more
violent than the incessant debate over the value to a doctor, a
decent normal doctor who made a good living and did not
worry about reading papers at medical associations, of remem-
bering anatomical terms. But no matter what they thought, they
all ground at learning the lists of names which enable a man
to crawl through examinations and become an Educated Person,
with a market value of five dollars an hour. Unknown sages
had invented rimes which enabled them to memorize. At supper
— the thirty piratical Digams sitting at a long and spotty table,
devouring clam chowder and beans and codfish balls and banana
layer-cake — the Freshmen earnestly repeated after a senior:

On old Olympus' topmost top

A fat-eared German viewed a hop.

Thus by association with the initial letters they mastered the
twelve cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, and
the rest. To the Digams it was the world's noblest poem, and
they remembered it for years after they had become practicing
physicians and altogether forgotten the names of the nerves
themselves.

In Dr. Stout's anatomy lectures there were no disturbances,
but in his dissecting-room were many pleasantries. The mildest
of them was the insertion of a fire-cracker in the cadaver on
which the two virginal and unhappy co-eds worked. The real
excitement during Freshman year was the incident of Clif Claw-
son and the pancreas.

23

Clif had been elected class president, for the year, because he
was so full of greetings. He never met a classmate in the hall
of Main Medical without shouting, "How's your vermiform
appendix functioning this morning?" or "I bid thee a lofty greet-
ing, old pediculosis." With booming decorum he presided at
class meetings (indignant meetings to denounce the proposal to
let the "aggies" use the North Side Tennis Courts), but in pri-
vate life he was less decorous.

The terrible thing happened when the Board of Regents were
being shown through the campus. The Regents were the su-
preme rulers of the University; they were bankers and manu-
facturers and pastors of large churches; to them even the presi-
dent was humble. Nothing gave them more interesting thrills
than the dissecting-room of the medical school. The preachers
spoke morally of the effect of alcohol on paupers, and the bank-
ers of the disrespect for savings-accounts which is always to be
seen in the kind of men who insist on becoming cadavers. In the
midst of the tour, led by Dr. Stout and the umbrella-carrying
secretary of the University, the plumpest and most educational
of all the bankers stopped near Clif Clawson's dissecting-table,
with his derby hat reverendy held behind him, and into that hat
Clif dropped a pancreas.

Now a pancreas is a damp and disgusting thing to find in
your new hat, and when the banker did so find one, he threw
down the hat and said that the students of Winnemac had gone
to the devil. Dr. Stout and the secretary comforted him; they
cleaned the derby and assured him that vengeance should be
done on the man who could put a pancreas in a banker's hat.

Dr. Stout summoned Clif, as president of the Freshmen. Clif
was pained. He assembled the class, he lamented that any Win-
nemac Man could place a pancreas in a banker's hat, and he
demanded that the criminal be manly enough to stand up and
confess.

Unfortunately the Reverend Ira Hinkley, who sat between
Martin and Angus Duer, had seen Clif drop the pancreas. He
growled, "This is outrageous! I'm going to expose Clawson,
even if he is a frat-brother of mine."

Martin protested, "Cut it out. You don't want to get him
fired?"

"He ought to be!"

24

Angus Duer turned in his seat, looked at Ira, and suggested,
"Will you kindly shut up?" and, as Ira subsided, Angus became
to Martin more admirable and more hateful than ever.

in

When he was depressed by a wonder as to why he was here,
listening to a Professor Robertshaw, repeating verses about fat-
eared Germans, learning the trade of medicine like Fatty Pfafr"
or Irving Watters, then Martin had relief in what he considered
debauches. Actually they were extremely small debauches; they
rarely went beyond too much lager in the adjacent city of Zenith,
or the smiles of a factory girl parading the sordid back avenues,
but to Martin, with his pride in taut strength, his joy in a clear
brain, they afterward seemed tragic.

His safest companion was Clif Clawson. No matter how much
bad beer he drank, Clif was never much more intoxicated than
in his normal state. Martin sank or rose to Clif's buoyancy, while
Clif rose or sank to Martin's speculativeness. As they sat in a
back-room, at a table glistening with beer-glass rings, Clif shook
his finger and babbled, "You're only one 'at gets me, Mart. You
know with all the hell-raising, and all the talk about bein' c'm-
mercial that I pull on these high boys like Ira Stinkley, I'm jus'
sick o' c'mmercialism an' -bunk as you are."

"Sure. You bet," Martin agreed with alcoholic fondness.
"You're jus' like me. My God, do you get it — dough-face like
Irving Watters or heartless climber like Angus Duer, and then
old Gottlieb! Ideal of research! Never bein' content with what
seems true! Alone, not carin' a damn, square-toed as a captain
on the bridge, working all night, getting to the bottom of
things!"

"Thash stuff. That's my idee, too. Lez have 'nother beer.
Shake you for it!" observed Clif Clawson.

Zenith, with its saloons, was fifteen miles from Mohalis and
the University of Winnemac; half an hour by the huge, roaring,
steel interurban trolleys, and to Zenith the medical students went
for their forays. To say that one had "gone into town last night"
was a matter for winks and leers. But with Angus Duer, Martin
discovered a new Zenith.

25

At supper Duer said abruptly, "Come into town with me and
hear a concert."

For all his fancied superiority to the class, Martin was illimit-
ably ignorant of literature, of painting, of music. That the blood-
less and acquisitive Angus Duer should waste time listening to
fiddlers was astounding to him. He discovered that Duer had
enthusiasm for two composers, called Bach and Beethoven, pre-
sumably Germans, and that he himself did not yet comprehend
all the ways of the world. On the interurban, Duer's gravity
loosened, and he cried, "Boy, if I hadn't been born to carve up
innards, I'd have been a great musician! Tonight I'm going to
lead you right into Heaven!"

Martin found himself in a confusion of little chairs and vast
gilded arches, of polite but disapproving ladies with programs
in their laps, unromantic musicians making unpleasant noises
below and, at last, incomprehensible beauty, which made for
him pictures of hills and deep forests, then suddenly became
achingly long-winded. He exulted, "I'm going to have 'em all —
the fame of Max Gottlieb — I mean his ability — and the lovely
music and lovely women — Golly! I'm going to do big things.
And see the world. . . . Will this piece never quit?"

IV

It was a week after the concert that he rediscovered Madeline
Fox.

Madeline was a handsome, high-colored, high-spirited, opin-
ionated girl whom Martin had known in college. She was stay-
ing on, ostensibly to take a graduate course in English, actually
to avoid going back home. She considered herself a superb tennis
player; she played it with energy and voluble swoopings and
large lack of direction. She believed herself to be a connoisseur
of literature; the fortunates to whom she gave her approval were
Hardy, Meredith, Howells, and Thackeray, none of whom she
had read for five years. She had often reproved Martin for his
inappreciation of Howells, for wearing flannel shirts, and for
his failure to hand her down from street-cars in the manner of
a fiction hero. In college, they had gone to dances together,
though as a dancer Martin was more spirited than accurate, and
his partners sometimes had difficulty in deciding just what he

26

was trying to dance. He liked Madeline's tall comeliness and her
vigor; he felt that with her energetic culture she was somehow
"good for him." During this year, he had scarcely seen her. He
thought of her late in the evenings, and planned to telephone
to her, and did not telephone. But as he became doubtful about
medicine he longed for her sympathy, and on a Sunday after-
noon of spring he took her for a walk along the Chaloosa River.

From the river bluffs the prairie stretches in exuberant rolling
hills. In the long barley fields, the rough pastures, the stunted
oaks and brilliant birches, there is the adventurousness of the
frontier, and like young plainsmen they tramped the bluffs and
told each other they were going to conquer the world.

He complained, "These damn' medics — "

"Oh, Martin, do you think 'damn' is a nice word?" said
Madeline.

He did think it was a very nice word indeed, and constantly
useful to a busy worker, but her smile was desirable.

"Well — these darn' studes, they aren't trying to learn science;
they're simply learning a trade. They just want to get the knowl-
edge that'll enable them to cash in. They don't talk about saving
lives but about 'losing cases' — losing dollars! And they wouldn't
even mind losing cases if it was a sensational operation that'd
advertise 'em! They make me sick! How many of 'em do you
find that're interested in the work Ehrlich is doing in Germany
— yes, or that Max Gottlieb is doing right here and now! Gott-
lieb's just taken an awful fall out of Wright's opsonin theory."

"Has he, really?"

"Has he! I should say he had! And do you get any of the
medics stirred up about it? You do not! They say, 'Oh, sure,
science is all right in its way; helps a doc to treat his patients,'
and then they begin to argue about whether they can make
more money if they locate in a big city or a town, and is it better
for a young doc to play the good-fellow and lodge game, or join
the church and look earnest. You ought to hear Irve Watters.
He's just got one idea: the fellow that gets ahead in medicine,
is he the lad that knows his pathology? Oh, no; the bird that
succeeds is the one that gets an office on a northeast corner,
near a trolley car junction, with a 'phone number that'll be easy
for patients to remember! Honest! He said so! I swear, when
I graduate I believe I'll be a ship's doctor. You see the worlr1.

27

that way, and at least you aren't racing up and down the boat
trying to drag patients away from some rival doc that has an
office on another deck!"

"Yes, I know; it's dreadful the way people don't have ideals
about their work. So many of the English grad students just
want to make money teaching, instead of enjoying scholarship
the way I do."

It was disconcerting to Martin that she should seem to think
that she was a superior person quite as much as himself, but
he was even more disconcerted when she bubbled:

"At the same time, Martin, one does have to be practical,
doesn't one! Think how much more money — no, I mean how
much more social position and power for doing good a success-
ful doctor has than one of these scientists that just putter, and
don't know what's going on in the world. Look at a surgeon
like Dr. Loizeau, riding up to the hospital in a lovely car with
a chauffeur in uniform, and all his patients simply worshiping
him, and then your Max Gottlieb — somebody pointed him out
to me the other day, and he had on a dreadful old suit, and I
certainly thought he could stand a hair-cut."

Martin turned on her with fury, statistics, vituperation, re-
ligious zeal, and confused metaphors. They sat on a crooked
old-fashioned rail-fence where over the sun-soaked bright plan-
tains the first insects of spring were humming. In the storm of
his fanaticism she lost her airy Culture and squeaked, "Yes, I
see now, I see," without stating what it was she saw. "Oh, you
do have a fine mind and such fine — such integrity."

"Honest? Do you think I have?"

"Oh, indeed I do, and I'm sure you're going to have a won-
derful future. And I'm so glad you aren't commercial, like the
others. Don't mind what they say!"

He noted that Madeline was not only a rare and understand-
ing spirit but also an extraordinarily desirable woman — fresh
color, tender eyes, adorable slope from shoulder to side. As they
walked back, he perceived that she was incredibly the right
mate for him. Under his training she would learn the distinc-
tion between vague "ideals" and the hard sureness of science.
They paused on the bluff, looking down at the muddy Chaloosa,
a springtime Western river wild with floating branches. He
yearned for her; he regretted the casual affairs of a student and

28

determined to be a pure and extremely industrious young man,
to be, in fact, "worthy of her."

"Oh, Madeline," he mourned, "you're so darn' lovely!"

She glanced at him, timidly.

He caught her hand; in a desperate burst he tried to kiss her.
It was very badly done. He managed only to kiss the point of
her jaw, while she struggled and begged, "Oh, don't!" They
did not acknowledge, as they ambled back into Mohalis, that
the incident had occurred, but there was softness in their voices
and without impatience now she heard his denunciation of Pro-
fessor Robertshaw as a phonograph, and he listened to her re-
marks on the shallowness and vulgarity of Dr. Norman Brum-
fit, that sprightly English instructor. At her boarding-house she
sighed, "I wish I could ask you to come in, but it's almost sup-
pertime and — Will you call me up some day?"

"You bet I will!" said Martin, according to the rules for
amorous discourse in the University of Winnemac.

He raced home in adoration. As he lay in his narrow upper
bunk at midnight, he saw her eyes, now impertinent, now re-
proving, now warm with trust in him. "I love her! I love her!
I'll 'phone her — Wonder if I dare call her up as early as eight
in the morning?"

But at eight he was too busy studying the lacrimal apparatus
to think of ladies' eyes. He saw Madeline only once, and in the
publicity of her boarding-house porch, crowded with co-eds, red
cushions, and marshmallows, before he was hurled into hectic
studying for the year's final examinations.

At examination-time, Digamma Pi fraternity showed its value
to urgent seekers after wisdom. Generations of Digams had
collected test-papers and preserved them in the sacred Quiz
Book; geniuses for detail had labored through the volume and
marked with red pencil the problems most often set in the
course of years. The Freshmen crouched in a ring about Ira
Hinkley in the Digam living-room, while he read out the ques-
tions they were most likely to get. They writhed, clawed their
hair, scratched their chins, bit their fingers, and beat their tem-

29

pies in the endeavor to give the right answer before Angus Duer
should read it to them out of the textbook.

In the midst of their sufferings they had to labor with Fatty
Pfaff.

Fatty had failed in the mid-year anatomical, and he had to
pass a special quiz before he could take the finals. There was a
certain fondness for him in Digamma Pi; Fatty was soft, Fatty
was superstitious, Fatty was an imbecile, yet they had for him
the annoyed affection they might have had for a second-hand
motor or a muddy dog. All of them worked on him; they tried
to lift him and thrust him through the examination as through
a trap-door. They panted and grunted and moaned at the labor,
and Fatty panted and moaned with them.

The night before his special examination they kept him at it
till two, with wet towels, black coffee, prayer, and profanity.
They repeated lists — lists — lists to him; they shook their fists in
his mournful red round face and howled, "Damn you, will you
remember that the bicuspid valve is the same as the mitral valve
and not another one?" They ran about the room, holding up
their hands and wailing, "Won't he never remember nothing
about nothing?" and charged back to purr with fictive calm,
"Now no use getting fussed, Fatty. Take it easy. Just listen to
this, quietly, will yuh, and try," coaxingly, "do try to remember
one thing, anyway!"

They led him carefully to bed. He was so filled with facts that
the slightest jostling would have spilled them.

When he awoke at seven, with red eyes and trembling lips,
he had forgotten everything he had learned.

"There's nothing for it," said the president of Digamma Pi.
"He's got to have a crib, and take his chance on getting caught
with it. I thought so. I made one out for him yesterday. It's a
lulu. It'll cover enough of the questions so he'll get through."

Even the Reverend Ira Hinkley, since he had witnessed the
horrors of the midnight before, went his ways ignoring the
crime. It was Fatty himself who protested: "Gee, I don't like
to cheat. I don't think a fellow that can't get through an exam-
ination had hardly ought to be allowed to practice medicine.
That's what my Dad said."

They poured more coffee into him and (on the advice of Clif
Clawson, who wasn't exactly sure what the effect might be but

30

who was willing to learn) they fed him a potassium bromide
tablet. The president of Digamma, seizing Fatty with some firm-
ness, growled, "I'm going to stick this crib in your pocket — look,
here in your breast pocket, behind your handkerchief."

"I won't use it. I don't care if I fail," whimpered Fatty.

"That's all right, but you keep it there. Maybe you can absorb
a little information from it through your lungs, for God
knows — " The president clenched his hair. His voice rose, and
in it was all the tragedy of night watches and black draughts
and hopeless retreats. "—God knows you can't take it in through
your head!"

They dusted Fatty, they stood him right side up, and pushed
him through the door, on his way to Anatomy Building. They
watched him go: a balloon on legs, a sausage in corduroy
trousers.

"Is it possible he's going to be honest?" marveled Clif Claw-
son.

"Well, if he is, we better go up and begin packing his trunk.
And this ole frat'll never have another goat like Fatty," grieved
the president.

They saw Fatty stop, remove his handkerchief, mournfully
blow his nose — and discover a long thin slip of paper. They saw
him frown at it, tap it on his knuckles, begin to read it, stuff
it back into his pocket, and go on with a more resolute step.

They danced hand in hand about the living-room of the fra-
ternity, piously assuring one another, "He'll use it — it's all right
— he'll get through or get hanged!"

He got through.

VI

Digamma Pi was more annoyed by Martin's restless doubtings
than by Fatty's idiocy, Clif Clawson's raucousness, Angus Duer's
rasping, or the Reverend Ira Hinkley's nagging.

During the strain of study for examinations Martin was pe-
culiarly vexing in regard to "laying in the best quality medical
terms like the best quality sterilizers — not for use but to impress
your patients." As one, the Digams suggested, "Say, if you don't
like the way we study medicine, we'll be tickled to death to
take up a collection and send you back to Elk Mills, where you
won't be disturbed by all us lowbrows and commercialists. Look

V

here! We don't tell you how you ought to work. Where do you
get the idea you got to tell us? Oh, turn it off, will you!"

Angus Duer observed, with sour sweetness, "We'll admit we're
simply carpenters, and you're a great investigator. But there's
several things you might turn to when you finish science. What
do you know about architecture? How's your French verbs?
How many big novels have you ever read? Who's the premier
of Austro-Hungary?"

Martin struggled, "I don't pretend to know anything — except
I do know what a man like Max Gottlieb means. He's got the
right method, and all these other hams of profs, they're simply
witch doctors. You think Gottlieb isn't religious, Hinkley. Why,
his just being in a lab is a prayer. Don't you idiots realize what
it means to have a man like that here, making new concepts of
life? Don't you — "

Clif Clawson, with a chasm of yawning, speculated, "Praying
in the lab! I'll bet I get the pants took off me, when I take bac-
teriology, if Pa Gottlieb catches me praying during experiment
hours!"

"Damn it, listen!" Martin wailed. "I tell you, you fellows are
the kind that keep medicine nothing but guess-work diagnosis,
and here you have a man — "

So they argued for hours, after their sweaty fact-grinding.

When the others had gone to bed, when the room was a
muck-heap of flung clothing and weary young men snoring in
iron bunks, Martin sat at the splintery long pine study-table,
worrying. Angus Duer glided in, demanding, "Look here, old
son. We're all sick of your crabbing. If you think medicine is
rot, the way we study it, and if you're so confoundedly honest,
why don't you get out?"

He left Martin to agonize, "He's right. I've got to shut up
or get out. Do I really mean it? What do I want? What am I
going to do?"

VII

Angus Duer's studiousness and his reverence for correct man-
ners were alike offended by Clif's bawdy singing, Clif's howling
conversation, Clif's fondness for dropping things in people's
soup, and Clif's melancholy inability to keep his hands washed.
For all his appearance of nerveless steadiness, during the tension

32

of examination-time Duer was as nervous as Martin, and one
evening at supper, when Clif was bellowing, Duer snapped,
"Will you kindly not make so much racket?"

"I'll make all the damn' racket I damn' please!" Clif asserted,
and a feud was on.

Clif was so noisy thereafter that he almost became tired of
his own noise. He was noisy in the living-room, he was noisy
in the bath, and with some sacrifice he lay awake pretending
to snore. If Duer was quiet and book-wrapped, he was not in
the least timid; he faced Clif with the eye of a magistrate, and
cowed him. Privily Clif complained to Martin, "Darn him, he
acts like I was a worm. Either he or me has got to get out of
Digam, that's a cinch, and it won't be me!"

He was ferocious and very noisy about it, and it was he who
got out. He said that the Digams were a "bunch of bum sports;
don't even have a decent game of poker," but he was fleeing
from the hard eyes of Angus Duer. And Martin resigned from
the fraternity with him, planned to room with him the coming
autumn.

Clif's blustering rubbed Martin as it did Duer. Clif had nc
reticences; when he was not telling slimy stories he was demand-
ing, "How much chuh pay for those shoes — must think you're a
Vanderbilt!" or "D'l see you walking with that Madeline Fox
femme — what chuh tryin' to do?" But Martin was alienated
from the civilized, industrious, nice young men of Digamma Pi,
in whose faces he could already see prescriptions, glossy white
sterilizers, smart enclosed motors, and glass office-signs in the
best gilt lettering. He preferred a barbarian loneliness, for next
year he would be working with Max Gottlieb, and he could not
be bothered.

That summer he spent with a crew installing telephones in
Montana.

He was a lineman in the wire-gang. It was his job to climb
the poles, digging the spurs of his leg-irons into the soft and
silvery pine, to carry up the wire, lash it to the glass insulators,
then down and to another pole.

They made perhaps five miles a day; at night they drove into
little rickety wooden towns. Their retiring was simple — they
removed their shoes and rolled up in a horse-blanket. Martin
wore overalls and a flannel shirt. He looked like a farm-hand.

33

Climbing all day long, he breathed deep, his eyes cleared of
worry, and one day he experienced a miracle.

He was atop a pole and suddenly, for no clear cause, his eyes
opened and he saw; as though he had just awakened he saw
that the prairie was vast, that the sun was kindly on rough
pasture and ripening wheat, on the old horses, the easy, broad-
beamed, friendly horses, and on his red-faced jocose companions;
he saw that the meadow larks were jubilant, and blackbirds
shining by little pools, and with the living sun all life was living.
Suppose the Angus Duers and Irving Watterses were tight
tradesmen. What of it? "I'm here!" he gloated.

The wire-gang were as healthy and as simple as the west
wind; they had no pretentiousness; though they handled elec-
trical equipment they did not, like medics, learn a confusion of
scientific terms and pretend to the farmers that they were scien-
tists. They laughed easily and were content to be themselves,
and with them Martin was content to forget how noble he was.
He had for them an affection such as he had for no one at the
University save Max Gottlieb.

He carried in his bag one book, Gottlieb's "Immunology." He
could often get through half a page of it before he bogged down
in chemical formulae. Occasionally, on Sundays or rainy days,
he tried to read it, and longed for the laboratory; occasionally
he thought of Madeline Fox, and became certain that he was
devastatingly lonely for her. But week slipped into careless and
robust week, and when he awoke in a stable, smelling the sweet
hay and the horses and the lark-ringing prairie that crept near
to the heart of these shanty towns, he cared only for the day's
work, the day's hiking, westward toward the sunset.

So they straggled through the Montana wheatland, whole
duchies of wheat in one shining field, through the cattle-country
and the sagebrush desert, and suddenly, staring at a persistent
cloud, Martin realized that he beheld the mountains.

Then he was on a train; the wire-gang were already forgotten;
and he was thinking only of Madeline Fox, Clif Clawson,
Angus Duer, and Max Gottlieb.

M

CHAPTER IV

PROFESSOR MAX GOTTLIEB was about to assassinate
a guinea pig with anthrax germs, and the bacteriology
class were nervous.

They had studied the forms of bacteria, they had handled
Petri dishes and platinum loops, they had proudly grown on
potato slices the harmless red cultures of Bacillus prodigiosus,
and they had come now to pathogenic germs and the inocula-
tion of a living animal with swift disease. These two beady-eyed
guinea pigs, chittering in a battery jar, would in two days be
stifl and dead.

Martin had an excitement not free from anxiety. He laughed
at it, he remembered with professional scorn how foolish were
the lay visitors to the laboratory, who believed that sanguinary
microbes would leap upon them from the mysterious centrifuge,
from the benches, from the air itself. But he was conscious that
in the cotton-plugged test-tube between the instrument-bath and
the bichloride jar on the demonstrator's desk were millions of
fatal anthrax germs.

The class looked respectful and did not stand too close. With
the flair of technique, the sure rapidity which dignified the
slightest movement of his hands, Dr. Gottlieb clipped the hair
on the belly of a guinea pig held by the assistant. He soaped
the belly with one flicker of a hand-brush, he shaved it and
painted it with iodine.

(And all the while Max Gottlieb was recalling the eagerness
of his first students, when he had just returned from working
with Koch and Pasteur, when he was fresh from enormous beer
seidels and Korpsbriider and ferocious arguments. Passionate,
beautiful days! Die goldene Zeit! His first classes in America, at
Queen City College had been awed by the sensational discov-

35

eries in bacteriology; they had crowded about him reverendy;
they had longed to know. Now the class was a mob. He looked
at them — Fatty Pfaff in the front row, his face vacant as a door-
knob; the co-eds emotional and frightened; only Martin Arrow-
smith and Angus Duer visibly intelligent. His memory fumbled
for a pale blue twilight in Munich, a bridge and a waiting girl,
and the sound of music.)

He dipped his hands in the bichloride solution and shook
them — a quick shake, fingers down, like the fingers of a pianist
above the keys. He took a hypodermic needle from the instru-
ment-bath and lifted the test-tube. His voice flowed indolently,
with German vowels and blurred W's:

"This, gentlemen, iss a twenty-four-hour culture of Bacillus
anthracis. You will note, I am sure you will have noted already,
that in the bottom of the tumbler there was cotton to keep the
tube from being broken. I cannot advise breaking tubes of
anthrax germs and afterwards getting the hands into the culture.
You might merely get anthrax boils — "

The class shuddered.

Gottlieb twitched out the cotton plug with his little finger, so
neatly that the medical students who had complained, "Bacteri-
ology is junk; urinalysis and blood tests are all the lab stuff we
need to know," now gave him something of the respect they had
for a man who could do card tricks or remove an appendix in
seven minutes. He agitated the mouth of the tube in the Bunsen
burner, droning, "Every time you take the plug from a tube,
flame the mouth of the tube. Make that a rule. It is a necessity
of the technique, and technique, gentlemen, is the beginning of
all science. It iss also the least-known thing in science."

The class was impatient. Why didn't he get on with it, on
to the entertainingly dreadful moment of inoculating the pig?

(And Max Gottlieb, glancing at the other guinea pig in the
prison of its battery jar, meditated, "Wretched innocent! Why
should I murder him, to teach Dummkopfe? It would be better
to experiment on that fat young man.")

He thrust the syringe into the tube, he withdrew the piston
dextrously with his index finger, and lectured:

"Take one half c.c. of the culture. There are two kinds of
M.D.'s — those to whom c.c. means cubic centimeter and those

36

to whom it means compound cathartic. The second kind are
more prosperous."

(But one cannot convey the quality of it: the thin drawl, the
sardonic amiability, the hiss of the S's, the D's turned into blunt
and challenging T's.)

The assistant held the guinea pig close; Gottlieb pinched up
the skin of the belly and punctured it with a quick down thrust
of the hypodermic needle. The pig gave a little jerk, a little
squeak, and the co-eds shuddered. Gottlieb's wise fingers knew
when the peritoneal wall was reached. He pushed home the
plunger of the syringe. He said quietly, "This poor animal will
now soon be dead as Moses." The class glanced at one another
uneasily. "Some of you will think that it does not matter; some
of you will think, like Bernard Shaw, that I am an executioner
and the more monstrous because I am cool about it; and some
of you will not think at all. This difference in philosophy iss
what makes life interesting."

While the assistant tagged the pig with a tin disk in its ear
and restored it to the battery jar, Gottlieb set down its weight
in a note-book, with the time of inoculation and the age of the
bacterial culture. These notes he reproduced on the blackboard,
in his fastidious script, murmuring, "Gentlemen, the most im-
portant part of living is not the living but pondering upon it.
And the most important part of experimentation is not doing
the experiment but making notes, ve-ry accurate quantitative
notes — in ink. I am told that a great many clever people feel
they can keep notes in their heads. I have often observed with
pleasure that such persons do not have heads in which to keep
their notes. This iss very good, because thus the world never sees
their results and science is not encumbered with them. I shall
now inoculate the second guinea pig, and the class will be dis-
missed. Before the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read
Pater's 'Marius the Epicurean,' to derife from it the calmness
which is the secret of laboratory skill."

As they bustled down the hall, Angus Duer observed to a
brother Digam, "Gottlieb is an old laboratory plug; he hasn't
got any imagination; he sticks here instead of getting out into

37

the world and enjoying the fight. But he certainly is handy.
Awfully good technique. He might have been a first-rate sur-
geon, and made fifty thousand dollars a year. As it is, I don't
suppose he gets a cent over four thousand!"

Ira Hinkley walked alone, worrying. He was an extraordi-
narily kindly man, this huge and bumbling parson. He rever-
ently accepted everything, no matter how contradictory to every-
thing else, that his medical instructors told him, but this killing
of animals — he hated it. By a connection not evident to him he
remembered that the Sunday before, in the slummy chapel
where he preached during his medical course, he had exalted
the sacrifice of the martyrs and they had sung of the blood of
the lamb, the fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's
veins, but this meditation he lost, and he lumbered toward Di-
gamma Pi in a fog of pondering pity.

Clif Clawson, walking with Fatty Pfaff, shouted, "Gosh, ole
pig certainly did jerk when Pa Gottlieb rammed that needle
home!" and Fatty begged, "Don't! Please!"

But Martin Arrowsmith saw himself doing the same experi-
ment and, as he remembered Gottlieb's unerring fingers, his
hands curved in imitation.

in

The guinea pigs grew drowsier and drowsier. In two days
they rolled over, kicked convulsively, and died. Full of dramatic
expectation, the class reassembled for the necropsy. On the dem-
onstrator's table was a wooden tray, scarred from the tacks
which for years had pinned down the corpses. The guinea pigs
were in a glass jar, rigid, their hair ruffled. The class tried to
remember how nibbling and alive they had been. The assistant
stretched out one of them with thumb-tacks. Gottlieb swabbed
its belly with a cotton wad soaked in lysol, slit it from belly to
neck, and cauterized the heart with a red-hot spatula — the class
quivered as they heard the searing of the flesh. Like a priest of
diabolic mysteries, he drew out the blackened blood with a
pipette. With the distended lungs, the spleen and kidneys and
liver, the assistant made wavy smears on glass slides which were
stained and given to the class for examination. The students
who had learned to look through the microscope without having

38

to close one eye were proud and professional, and all of them
talked of the beauty of identifying the bacillus, as they twiddled
the brass thumbscrews to the right focus and the cells rose from
cloudiness to sharp distinctness on the slides before them. But
they were uneasy, for Gottlieb remained with them that day,
stalking behind them, saying nothing, watching them always^
watching the disposal of the remains of the guinea pigs, and
along the benches ran nervous rumors about a bygone studen/
who had died from anthrax infection in the laboratory.

IV

There was for Martin in these days a quality of satisfying
delight; the zest of a fast hockey game, the serenity of the
prairie, the bewilderment of great music, and a feeling of crea-
tion. He woke early and thought contentedly of the day; he
hurried to his work, devout, unseeing.

The confusion of the bacteriological laboratory was ecstasy to
him — the students in shirt-sleeves, filtering nutrient gelatine,
their fingers gummed from the crinkly gelatine leaves; or heat-
ing media in an autoclave like a silver howitzer. The roaring
Bunsen flames beneath the hot-air ovens, the steam from the
Arnold sterilizers rolling to the rafters, clouding the windows,
were to Martin lovely with activity, and to him the most radiant
things in the world were rows of test-tubes filled with watery
serum and plugged with cotton singed to a coffee brown, a fine
platinum loop leaning in a shiny test-glass, a fantastic hedge of
tall glass tubes mysteriously connecting jars, or a bottle rich with
gentian violet stain.

He had begun, perhaps in youthful imitation of Gottlieb, to
work by himself in the laboratory at night. . . . The long room
was dark, thick dark, but for the gas-mantle behind his micro-
scope. The cone of light cast a gloss on the bright brass tube,
a sheen on his black hair, as he bent over the eyepiece. He was
studying trypanosomes from a rat — an eight-branched rosette
stained with polychrome methylene blue; a cluster of organisms
delicate as a narcissus, with their purple nuclei, their light blue
cells, and the thin lines of the flagella. He was excited and a
little proud; he had stained the germs perfectly, and it is not easy
to stain a rosette without breaking the petal shape. In the dark-

39

ness, a step, the weary step of Max Gottlieb, and a hand on
Martin's shoulder. Silently Martin raised his head, pushed the
microscope toward him. Bending down, a cigarette stub in his
mouth — the smoke would have stung the eyes of any human
being — Gottlieb peered at the preparation.

He adjusted the gas light a quarter inch, and mused, "Splen-
did! You have craftsmanship. Oh, there is an art in science —
for a few. You Americans, so many of you — all full with ideas,
but you are impatient with the beautiful dullness of long labors.
I see already — and I watch you in the lab before — perhaps you
may try the trypanosomes of sleeping sickness. They are very,
very interesting, and very, very tickelish to handle. It is quite
a nice disease. In some villages in Africa, fifty per cent of the
people have it, and it is invariably fatal. Yes, I think you might
work on the bugs."

Which, to Martin, was getting his brigade in batde.

"I shall have," said Gottlieb, "a little sandwich in my room
at midnight. If you should happen to work so late, I should be
very pleast if you would come to have a bite."

Diffidently, Martin crossed the hall to Gottlieb's immaculate
laboratory at midnight. On the bench were coffee and sand-
wiches, curiously small and excellent sandwiches, foreign to
Martin's lunch-room taste.

Gottlieb talked till Clif had faded from existence and Angus
Duer seemed but an absurd climber. He summoned forth Lon-
don laboratories, dinners on frosty evenings in Stockholm, walks
on the Pincio with sunset behind the dome of San Pietro, ex-
treme danger and overpowering disgust from excreta-smeared
garments in an epidemic at Marseilles. His reserve slipped from
him and he talked of himself and of his family as though Martin
were a contemporary.

The cousin who was a colonel in Uruguay and the cousin,
a rabbi, who was tortured in a pogrom in Moscow. His sick
wife — it might be cancer. The three children — the youngest girl,
Miriam, she was a good musician, but the boy, the fourteen-
year-old, he was a worry; he was saucy, he would not study.
Himself, he had worked for yeaps on the synthesis of antibodies;
he was at present in a blind alley, and at Mohalis there was no
one who was interested, no one to stir him, but he was having

40

an agreeable time massacring the opsonin theory, and that
cheered him.

"No, I have done nothing except be unpleasant to people that
claim too much, but I have dreams of real discoveries some day.
And — No. Not five times in five years do I have students who
understand craftsmanship and precision and maybe some big
imagination in hypotheses. I t'ink perhaps you may have them.
If I can help you — So!

"I do not t'ink you will be a good doctor. Good doctors are
fine — often they are artists — but their trade, it is not for us
lonely ones that work in labs. Once, I took an M.D. label. In
Heidelberg that was — Herr Gott, back in 1875! I could not get
much interested in bandaging legs and looking at tongues. I
was a follower of Helmholtz — what a wild blithering young
fellow! I tried to make researches into the physics of sound —
I was bad, most unbelievable, but I learned that in this wale of
tears there is nothing certain but the quantitative method. And
I was a chemist — a fine stink-maker was I. And so into biology
and much trouble. It has been good. I have found one or two
things. And if sometimes I feel an exile, cold — I had to get out
of Germany one time for refusing to sing Die Wacht am Rhein
and trying to kill a cavalry captain — he was a stout fellow — I
had to choke him — you see I am boasting, but I was a lifely Kerl
thirty years ago! Ah! So!

"There is but one trouble of a philosophical bacteriologist.
Why should we destroy these amiable pathogenic germs? Are
we too sure, when we regard these oh, most unbeautiful young
students attending Y.M.C.A.'s and singing dinkle-songs and
wearing hats with initials burned into them — iss it worth while
to protect them from the so elegantly functioning Bacillus
typhosus with its lovely flagella? You know, once I asked Dean
Silva would it not be better to let loose the pathogenic germs
on the world, and so solve all economic questions. But he did
not care for my met'od. Oh, well, he is older than I am; he also
gives, I hear, some dinner parties with bishops and judges pres-
ent, all in nice clothes. He would know more than a German
Jew who loves Father Nietzsche and Father Schopenhauer (but
damn him, he was teleological-minded!) and Father Koch and
Father Pasteur and Brother Jacques Loeb and Brother Arrhenius.

41

Ja! I talk foolishness. Let us go look at your slides and so good
night."

When he had left Gottlieb at his stupid brown little house,
his face as reticent as though the midnight supper and all the
rambling talk had never happened, Martin ran home altogether
drunk.

CHAPTER V

THOUGH bacteriology was all of Martin's life now, it was
the theory of the University that he was also studying
pathology, hygiene, surgical anatomy, and enough other
subjects to swamp a genius.

Clif Clawson and he lived in a large room with flowered wall-
paper, piles of filthy clothes, iron beds, and cuspidors. They
made their own breakfasts; they dined on hash at the Pilgrim
Lunch Wagon or the Dew Drop Inn. Clif was occasionally irri-
tating; he hated open windows; he talked of dirty socks; he
sang "Some Die of Diabetes" when Martin was studying; and
he was altogether unable to say anything directly. He had to be
humorous. He remarked, "Is it your combobulatory concept that
we might now feed the old faces?" or "How 'about ingurgitat-
ing a few calories?" But he had for Martin a charm that could
not be accounted for by cheerfulness, his shrewdness, his vague
courage. The whole of Clif was more than the sum of his vari-
ous parts.

In the joy of his laboratory work Martin thought rarely of his
recent associates in Digamma Pi. He occasionally protested that
the Reverend Ira Hinkley was a village policeman and Irving
Watters a plumber, that Angus Duer would walk to success
over his grandmother's head, and that for an idiot like Fatty
Pfaff to practice on helpless human beings was criminal,- but
mostly he ignored them and ceased to be a pest. And when he
had passed his first triumphs in bacteriology and discovered how
remarkably much he did not know, he was curiously humble.

If he was less annoying in regard to his classmates, he was
more so in his classrooms. He had learned from Gottlieb the
trick of using the word "control" in reference to the person or
animal or chemical left untreated during an experiment, as a

43

standard for comparison; and there is no trick more infuriating.
When a physician boasted of his success with this drug or that
electric cabinet, Gottlieb always snorted, "Where was your con-
trol? How many cases did you have under identical conditions,
and how many of them did not get the treatment?" Now Martin
began to mouth it — control, control, control, where's your con-
trol? where's your control? — till most of his fellows and a few
of his instructors desired to lynch him.

He was particularly tedious in materia medica.

The professor of materia medica, Dr. Lloyd Davidson, would
have been an illustrious shopkeeper. He was very popular. From
him a future physician could learn that most important of all
things : the proper drugs to give a patient, particularly when you
cannot discover what is the matter with him. His classes listened
with zeal, and memorized the sacred hundred and fifty favorite
prescriptions. (He was proud that this was fifty more than his
predecessor had required.)

But Martin was rebellious. He inquired, and publicly, "Dr.
Davidson, how do they know ichthyol is good for erysipelas?
Isn't it just rotten fossil fish — isn't it like the mummy-dust and
puppy-ear stuff they used to give in the olden days?"

"How do they know? Why, my critical young friend, because
thousands of physicians have used it for years and found their
patients getting better, and that's how they know!"

"But honest, Doctor, wouldn't the patients maybe have gotten
better anyway? Wasn't it maybe a post hoc, propter hoc? Have
they ever experimented on a whole slew of patients together,
with controls?"

"Probably not — and until some genius like yourself, Arrow-
smith, can herd together a few hundred people with exactly
identical cases of erysipelas, it probably never will be tried!
Meanwhile I trust that you other gentlemen, who perhaps lack
Mr. Arrowsmith's profound scientific attainments and the power
to use such handy technical terms as 'control,' will, merely on
my feeble advice, continue to use ichthyol!"

But Martin insisted, "Please, Dr. Davidson, what's the use of
getting all these prescriptions by heart, anyway? We'll forget
most of 'em, and besides, we can always look 'em up in the
book."

Davidson pressed his lips together, then:

44

"Arrowsmith, with a man of your age I hate to answer you
as I would a three-year-old boy, but apparently I must. There-
fore, you will learn the properties of drugs and the contents of
prescriptions because I tell you to! If I did not hesitate to waste
the time of the other members of this class, I would try to con-
vince you that my statements may be accepted, not on my
humble authority, but because they are the conclusions of wise
men — men wiser or certainly a little older than you, my friend —
through many ages. But as I have no desire to indulge in fancy
flights of rhetoric and eloquence, I shall merely say that you
will accept, and you will study, and you will memorize, because
I tell you to!"

Martin considered dropping his medical course and specializ-
ing in bacteriology. He tried to confide in Clif, but Clif had
become impatient of his fretting, and he turned again to the
energetic and willowy Madeline Fox.

ii

Madeline was at once sympathetic and sensible. Why not com-
plete his medical course, then see what he wanted to do?

They tramped, they skated, they skied, they went to the Uni-
versity Dramatic Society play. Madeline's widowed mother had
come to live with her, and they had taken a top-floor flat in one
of the tiny apartment-houses which were beginning to replace
the expansive old wooden houses of Mohalis. The flat was full
of literature and decoration: a bronze Buddha from Chicago,
a rubbing of Shakespeare's epitaph, a set of Anatole France in
translation, a photograph of Cologne cathedral, a wicker tea-
table with a samovar whose operation no one in the University
understood, and a souvenir post-card album. Madeline's mother
was a Main Street dowager duchess. She was stately and white-
haired but she attended the Methodist Church. In Mohalis she
was flustered by the chatter of the students; she longed for her
home-town, for the church sociables and the meetings of the
women's club — they were studying Education this year and she
hated to lose all the information about university ways.

With a home and a chaperone, Madeline began to "entertain":
eight-o'clock parties with coffee, chocolate cake, chicken salad,
and word-games. She invited Martin, but he was jealous of his

45

evenings, beautiful evenings of research. The first affair to
which she enticed him was her big New Year's Party in Janu-
ary. They "did advertisements" — guessed at tableaux represent-
ing advertising pictures; they danced to the phonograph; and
they had not merely a lap-supper but little tables excessively
covered with doilies.

Martin was unaccustomed to such elegance. Though he had
come in sulky unwillingness, he was impressed by the supper,
by the frocks of the young women; he realized that his dancing
was rusty, and he envied the senior who could do the new waltz
called the "Boston." There was no strength, no grace, no knowl-
edge, that Martin Arrowsmith did not covet, when consciousness
of it had pierced through the layers of his absorption. If he was
but little greedy for possessions, he was hungry for every skill.

His reluctant wonder at the others was drowned in his ad-
miration for Madeline. He had known her as a jacketed outdoor
girl, but this was an exquisite indoor Madeline, slender in yellow
silk. She seemed to him a miracle of tact and ease as she bullied
her guests into an appearance of merriment. She had need of
tact, for Dr. Norman Brumfit was there, and it was one of Dr.
Brumfit's evenings to be original and naughty. He pretended
to kiss Madeline's mother, which Vastly discomforted the poor
lady; he sang a strongly improper Negro song containing the
word hell; he maintained to a group of women graduate stu-
dents that George Sand's affairs might perhaps be partially justi-
fied by their influence on men of talent; and when they looked
shocked, he pranced a little, and his eye-glasses glittered.

Madeline took charge of him. She trilled, "Dr. Brumfit, you're
terribly learned and so on and so forth, and sometimes in Eng-
lish classes I'm simply scared to death of you, but other times
you're nothing but a bad small boy, and I won't have you teasing
the girls. You can help me bring in the sherbet, that's what you
can do."

Martin adored her. He hated Brumfit for the privilege of
disappearing with her into the closet-like kitchen of the flat.
Madeline! She was the one person who understood him! Here,
where everyone snatched at her and Dr. Brumfit beamed on
her with almost matrimonial fondness, she was precious, she
was something he must have.

46

On pretense of helping her set the tables, he had a moment
with her, and whimpered, "Lord, you're so lovely!"

"I'm glad you think I'm a wee bit nice." She, the rose and
the adored of all the world, gave him her favor.

"Can I come call on you tomorrow evening?"

"Well, I— Perhaps."

in

It cannot be said, in this biography of a young man who was
in no degree a hero, who regarded himself as a seeker after
truth yet who stumbled and slid back all his life and bogged
himself in every obvious morass, that Martin's intentions toward
Madeline Fox were what is called "honorable." He was not a
Don Juan, but he was a poor medical student who would have
to wait for years before he could make a living. Certainly he
did not think of proposing marriage. He wanted — like most
poor and ardent young men in such a case, he wanted all he
could get.

As he raced toward her flat, he was expectant of adventure.
He pictured her melting; he felt her hand glide down his cheek.
He warned himself, "Don't be a fool now! Probably nothing
doing at all. Don't go get all worked up and then be disap-
pointed. She'll probably cuss you out for something you did
wrong at the party. She'll probably be sleepy and wish you
hadn't come. Nothing!" But he did not for a second believe it.

He rang, he saw her opening the door, he followed her down
the meager hall, longing to take her hand. He came into the
over-bright living-room — and he found her mother, solid as a
pyramid, permanent-looking as sunless winter.

But of course Mother would obligingly go, and leave him to
conquest.

Mother did not.

In Mohalis, the suitable time for young men callers to depart
is ten o'clock, but from eight till a quarter after eleven Martin
did battle with Mrs. Fox; talked to her in two languages, an
audible gossip and a mute but furious protest, while Madeline —
she was present; she sat about and looked pretty. In an equally
silent tongue Mrs. Fox answered him, till the room was thick
with their antagonism, while they seemed to be discussing the
weather, the University, and the trolley service into Zenith.

47

"Yes, of course, some day I guess they'll have a car every
twenty minutes," he said weightily.

("Darn her, why doesn't she go to bed? Cheers! She's doing
up her knitting. Nope. Damn it! She's taking another ball of
wool")

"Oh, yes, I'm sure they'll have to have better service," said
Mrs. Fox.

("Young man, I don't know much about you, but I don't
believe you're the right kind of person for Madeline to go with.
Anyway, it's time you went home.")

"Oh, yes, sure, you bet. Lot better service."

("I know I'm staying too long, and I know you know it, but
I don't care!")

It seemed impossible that Mrs. Fox should endure his stolid
persistence. He used thought-forms, will-power, and hypnotism,
and when he rose, defeated, she was still there, extremely placid.
They said good-by not too warmly. Madeline took him to the
door; for an exhilarating half-minute he had her alone.

"I wanted so much — I wanted to talk to you!"

"I know. I'm sorry. Some time!" she muttered.

He kissed her. It was a tempestuous kiss, and very sweet.

IV

Fudge parties, skating parties, sleighing parties, a literary party
with the guest of honor a lady journalist who did the social page
for the Zenith Advocate-Times — Madeline leaped into an orgy
of jocund but extraordinarily tiring entertainments, and Martin
obediently and smolderingly followed her. She appeared to have
trouble in getting enough men, and to the literary evening
Martin dragged the enraged Clif Clawson. Clif grumbled, "This
is the damnedest zoo of sparrows I ever did time in," but he
bore off treasure — he had heard Madeline call Martin by her
favorite name of "Martykins." That was very valuable. Clif
called him Martykins. Clif told others to call him Martykins.
Fatty Pfaff and Irving Watters called him Martykins. And when
Martin wanted to go to sleep, Clif croaked:

"Yuh, you'll probably marry her. She's a dead shot. She can
hit a smart young M.D. at ninety paces. Oh, you'll have one fine
young time going on with science after that skirt sets you at

48

tonsil-snatching. . . . She's one of these literary birds. She knows
all about lite'ature except maybe how to read. . . . She's not so
bad-looking, now. She'll get fat, like her Ma."

Martin said that which was necessary, and he concluded, "She's
the only girl in the graduate school that's got any pep. The
others just sit around and talk, and she gets up the best parties — "

"Any kissing parties?"

"Now you look here! I'll be getting sore, first thing you know!
You and I are roughnecks, but Madeline Fox — she's like Angus
Duer, some ways. I realize all the stuff we're missing: music
and literature, yes, and decent clothes, too — no harm to dressing
well—"

"That's just what I was tellin' you! She'll have you all dolled
up in a Prince Albert and a boiled shirt, diagnosing everything
as rich-widowitis. How you can fall for that four-flushing dame —
Where's your control?"

Clif's opposition stirred him to consider Madeline not merely
with a sly and avaricious interest but with a dramatic conviction
that he longed to marry her.

Few women can for long periods keep from trying to Improve
their men, and To Improve means to change a person from
what he is, whatever that may be, into something else. Girls like
Madeline Fox, artistic young women who do not work at it,
cannot be restrained from Improving for more than a day at a
time. The moment the urgent Martin showed that he was stirred
by her graces, she went at his clothes — his corduroys and soft
collars and eccentric old gray felt hat — at his vocabulary and his
taste in fiction, with new and more patronizing vigor. Her
sketchy way of saying, "Why, of course everybody knows that
Emerson was the greatest thinker" irritated him the more in
contrast to Gottlieb's dark patience.

"Oh, let me alone!" he hurled at her. "You're the nicest thing
the Lord ever made, when you stick to things you know about,
but when you spring your ideas on politics and chemotherapy —
Darn it, quit bullying me! I guess you're right about slang. I'll
cut Out all this junk about 'feeding your face' and so on. But
I will not put on a hard-boiled collar! I won't!"

49

He might never have proposed to her but for the spring eve-
ning on the roof.

She used the flat roof of her apartment-house as a garden. She
had set out one box of geraniums and a cast-iron bench like
those once beheld in cemetery plots; she had hung up two Japa-
nese lanterns — they were ragged and they hung crooked. She
spoke with scorn of the other inhabitants of the apartment-
house, who were "so prosaic, so conventional, that they never
came up to this darling hidey-place." She compared her refuge
to the roof of a Moorish palace, to a Spanish patio, to a Japanese
garden, to a "pleasaunce of old Provencal." But to Martin it
seemed a good deal like a plain roof. He was vaguely ready for
a quarrel, that April evening when he called on Madeline and
her mother snifnly told him that she was to be found on the roof.

"Damned Japanese lanterns. Rather look at liver-sections," he
grumbled, as he trudged up the curving stairs.

Madeline was sitting on the funereal iron bench, her chin in
her hands. For once she did not greet him with flowery excite-
ment but with a noncommittal "Hello." She seemed spiritless.
He felt guilty for his scoffing; he suddenly saw the pathos in
her pretense that this stretch of tar-paper and slatted walks was
a blazing garden. As he sat beside her he piped, "Say, that's a
dandy new strip of matting you've put down."

"It is not! It's mangy!" She turned toward him. She wailed,
"Oh, Mart, I'm so sick of myself, tonight. I'm always trying to
make people think I'm somebody. I'm not. I'm a bluff."

"What is it, dear?"

"Oh, it's lots. Dr. Brumfit, hang him — only he was right —
he as good as told me that if I don't work harder I'll have to
get out of the graduate school. I'm not doing a thing, he said,
and if I don't have my Ph.D., then I won't be able to land a
nice job teaching English in some swell school, and I'd better
land one, too, because it doesn't look to poor Madeline as if any-
body was going to marry her."

His arm about her, he blared, "I know exactly who — "

"No, I'm not fishing. I'm almost honest, tonight. I'm no good,
Mart. I tell people how clever I am. And I don't suppose they
believe it. Probably they go off and laugh at me!"

"They do not! If they did — I'd like to see anybody that tried
laughing — "

50

"It's awfully sweet and dear of you, but I'm not worth it. Tho
poetic Madeline. With her ree-fined vocabulary! I'm a — I'm a—
Martin, I'm a tin-horn sport! I'm everything your friend Clil
thinks I am. Oh, you needn't tell me. I know what he thinks.
And — I'll have to go home with Mother, and I can't stand it,
dear, I can't stand it! I won't go back! That town! Never any-
thing doing! The old tabbies, and the beastly old men, always
telling the same old jokes. I won't!"

Her head was in the hollow of his arm; she was weeping,
hard; he was stroking her hair, not covetously now but tenderly,
and he was whispering:

"Darling! I almost feel as if I dared to love you. You're going
to marry me and — Take me couple more years to finish my
medical course and couple in hospital, then we'll be married
and — By thunder, with you helping me, I'm going to climb to
the top! Be big surgeon! We're going to have everything!"

"Dearest, do be wise. I don't want to keep you from your
scientific work — "

"Oh. Well. Well, I would like to keep up some research. But
thunder, I'm not just a lab-cat. Battle o' life. Smashing your way
through. Competing with real men in real he-struggle. If I can't
do that and do some scientific work too, I'm no good. Course
while I'm with Gottlieb, I want to take advantage of it, but
afterward — Oh, Madeline!"

Then was all reasoning lost in a blur of nearness to her.

VI

He dreaded the interview with Mrs. Fox; he was certain that
she would demand, "Young man, how do you expect to support
my Maddy? And you use bad language." But she took his
hand and mourned, "I hope you and my baby will be happy.
She's a dear good girl, even if she is a little flighty sometimes,
and I know you're nice and kind and hard-working. I shall
pray you'll be happy — oh, I'll pray so hard! You young people
don't seem to think much of prayer, but if you knew how it
helped me — Oh, I'll petition for your sweet happiness!"

She was weeping; she kissed Martin's forehead with the dry,
soft, gentle kiss of an old woman, and he was near to weeping
with her.

51

At parting Madeline whispered, "Boy, I don't care a bit, my-
self, but Mother would love it if we went to church with her.
Don't you think you could, just once?"

The astounded world, the astounded and profane Clif Claw-
son, had the spectacle of Martin in shiny pressed clothes, a pain-
ful linen collar, and an arduously tied scarf, accompanying Mrs.
Fox and the chastely chattering Madeline to the Mohalis Meth-
odist Church, to hear the Reverend Dr. Myron Schwab discourse
on "The One Way to Righteousness."

They passed the Reverend Ira Hinkley, and Ira gloated with
a holy gloating at Martin's captivity.

VII

For all his devotion to Max Gottlieb's pessimistic view of the
human intellect, Martin had believed that there was such a thing
as progress, that events meant something, that people could learn
something, that if Madeline had once admitted she was an ordi-
nary young woman who occasionally failed, then she was saved.
He was bewildered when she began improving him more airily
than ever. She complained of his vulgarity and what she asserted
to be his slack ambition. "You think it's terribly smart of you
to feel superior. Sometimes I wonder if it isn't just laziness. You
like to day-dream around labs. Why should you be spared the
work of memorizing your materia medica and so on and so
forth? All the others have to do it. No, I won't kiss you. I want
you to grow up and listen to reason."

In fury at her badgering, in desire for her lips and forgiving
smile, he was whirled through to the end of the term.

A week before examinations, when he was trying to spend
twenty-four hours a day in making love to her, twenty-four in
grinding for examinations, and twenty-four in the bacteriologi-
cal laboratory, he promised Clif that he would spend that sum-
mer vacation with him, working as a waiter in a Canadian hotel.
He met Madeline in the evening, and with her walked through
the cherry orchard on the Agricultural Experiment Station
grounds.

"You know what I think of your horrid Clif Clawson," she
complained. "I don't suppose vou care to hear my opinion of
him."

"I've had your opinion, my beloved." Martin sounded mature,
and not too pleasant.

"Well, I can tell you right now you haven't had my opinion
of your being a waiter! For the life of me I can't understand
why you don't get some gentlemanly job for vacation, instead
of hustling dirty dishes. Why couldn't you work on a news-
paper, where you'd have to dress decently and meet nice people?"

"Sure. I might edit the paper. But since you say so, I won't
work at all this summer. Fool thing to do, anyway. I'll go to
Newport and play golf and wear a dress suit every night."

"It wouldn't hurt you any! I do respect honest labor. It's like
Burns says. But waiting on table! Oh, Mart, why are you so
proud of being a roughneck ? Do stop being smart, for a minute.
Listen to the night. And smell the cherry blossoms. ... Or
maybe a great scientist like you, that's so superior to ordinary
people, is too good for cherry blossoms!"

"Well, except for the fact that every cherry blossom has been
gone for weeks now, you're dead right."

"Oh, they have, have they! They may be faded but — Will
you be so good as to tell me what that pale white mass is up
there?"

"I will. It looks to me like a hired-man's shirt."

"Martin Arrowsmith, if you think for one moment that I'm
ever going to marry a vulgar, crude, selfish, microbe-grubbing
smart aleck — "

"And if you think I'm going to marry a dame that keeps nag-
nag-naggin' and jab-jab-jabbin' at me all day long — "

They hurt each other; they had pleasure in it; and they parted
forever, twice they parted forever, the second time very rudely,
near a fraternity-house where students were singing heart-break-
ing summer songs to a banjo.

In ten days, without seeing her again, he was off with Clif
to the North Woods, and in his sorrow of losing her, his longing
for her soft flesh and for her willingness to listen to him, he
was only a little excited that he should have led the class in
bacteriology, and that Max Gottlieb should have appointed him
undergraduate assistant for the coming year.

53

CHAPTER VI

THE waiters at Nokomis Lodge, among the Ontario pines,
were all of them university students. They were not sup-
posed to appear at the Lodge dances — they merely ap-
peared, and took the prettiest girls away from the elderly and
denunciatory suitors in white flannels. They had to work but
seven hours a day. The rest of the time they fished, swam, and
tramped the shadowy trails, and Martin came back to Mohalis
placid — and enormously in love with Madeline.

They had written to each other, politely, regretfully, and once
a fortnight; then passionately and daily. For the summer she
had been dragged to her home town, near the Ohio border of
Winnemac, a town larger than Martin's native Elk Mills but
more sun-baked, more barren with little factories. She sighed, in
a huge loose script dashing all over the page:

Perhaps we shall never see each other again but I do want you
to \now how much I prize all the tal\s use had together about
science & ideals & education, etc. — / certainly appreciate them
here when I listen to these stic\ in the muds going on, oh, it is
too dreadful, about their automobiles & how much they have to
pay their maids and so on & so forth. You gave me so much but
I did give you something didn't I? I cant always be in the
wrong can I?

"My dear, my little girl!" he lamented. "'Can't always be in
the wrong'! You poor kid, you poor dear kid!"

By midsummer they were firmly re-engaged and, though he
was slightly disturbed by the cashier, a young and giggling
Wisconsin school-teacher with ankles, he so longed for Madeline
that he lay awake thinking of giving up his job and fleeing to
her raresses — lay awake for minutes at a time.

54

The returning train was torturingly slow, and he dismounted
at Mohalis fevered with visions of her. Twenty minutes after,
they were clinging together in the quiet of her living-room. It is
true that twenty minutes after that, she was sneering at Clif
Clawson, at fishing, and at all school-teachers, but to his fury
she yielded in tears.

His Junior year was a whirlwind. To attend lectures on physi-
cal diagnosis, surgery, neurology, obstetrics, and gynecology in
the morning, with hospital demonstrations in the afternoon; to
supervise the making of media and the sterilization of glassware
for Gottlieb; to instruct a new class in the use of microscope
and filter and autoclave; to read a page now and then of scien-
tific German or French; to see Madeline constantly; to get
through it all he drove himself to hysterical hurrying, and in
the dizziest of it he began his first original research — his first
lyric, his first ascent of unexplored mountains.

He had immunized rabbits to typhoid, and he believed that
if he mixed serum taken from these immune animals with
typhoid germs, the germs would die. Unfortunately — he felt —
the germs grew joyfully. He was troubled; he was sure that his
technique had been clumsy; he performed his experiment over
and over, working till midnight, waking at dawn to ponder on
his notes. (Though in letters to Madeline his writing was an
inconsistent scrawl, in his laboratory notes it was precise.) When
he was quite sure that Nature was persisting in doing some-
thing she ought not to, he went guiltily to Gottlieb, protesting,
"The darn' bugs ought to die in this immune serum, but they
don't. There's something wrong with the theories."

"Young man, do you set yourself up against science?" grated
Gottlieb, flapping the papers on his desk. "Do you feel com-
petent, huh, to attack the dogmas of immunology?"

"I'm sorry, sir. I can't help what the dogma is. Here's my
protocols. Honestly, I've gone over and over the stuff, and I gel.
the same results, as you can see. I only know what I observe."

Gottlieb beamed. "I give you, my boy, my episcopal blessings!
That is the way! Observe what you observe, and if it doeb
violence to all the nice correct views of science — out they go-

55

I am very pleast, Martin. But now find out the Why, the under-
neath principle."

Ordinarily, Gottlieb called him "Arrowsmith" or "You" or
"Uh." When he was furious he called him, or any other student,
"Doctor." It was only in high moments that he honored him
with "Martin," and the boy trotted off blissfully, to try to find
(but never to succeed in finding) the Why that made every-
thing so.

in

Gottlieb had sent him into Zenith, to the huge Zenith General
Hospital, to secure a strain of meningococcus from an interest-
ing patient. The bored reception clerk — who was interested only
in obtaining the names, business addresses, and religions of
patients, and did not care who died or who spat on the beautiful
blue and white linoleum or who went about collecting meningo-
cocci, so long as the addresses were properly entered — loftily told
him to go up to Ward D. Through the long hallways, past num-
berless rooms from which peered yellow-faced old women sit-
ting up in bed in linty nightgowns, Martin wandered, trying to
look important, hoping to be taken for a doctor, and succeeding
only in feeling extraordinarily embarrassed.

He passed several nurses rapidly, half nodding to them, in
the manner (or what he conceived to be the manner) of a bril-
liant young surgeon who is about to operate. He was so ab-
sorbed in looking like a brilliant young surgeon that he was
completely lost, and discovered himself in a wing filled with
private suites. He was late. He had no more time to go on being
impressive. Like all males, he hated to confess ignorance by ask-
ing directions, but grudgingly he stopped at the door of a bed-
room in which a probationer nurse was scrubbing the floor.

She was a smallish and slender probationer, muffled in a harsh
blue denim dress, an enormous white apron, and a turban bound
about her head with an elastic — a uniform as grubby as her pail
of scrub-water. She peered up with the alert impudence of a
squirrel.

"Nurse," he said, "I want to find Ward D."

Lazily, "Do you?"

"I do! If I can interrupt your work — "

"Doesn't matter. The damn' superintendent of nurses put me

56

at scrubbing, and wc aren't ever supposed to scrub floors, be-
cause she caught me smoking a cigarette. She's an old terror.
If she found a child like you wandering around here, she'd drag
you out by the ear."

"My dear young woman, it may interest you to know — "

"Oh! 'My dear young woman, it may — ' Sounds exactly like
our old prof, back home."

Her indolent amusement, her manner of treating him as
though they were a pair of children making tongues at each
other in a railroad station, was infuriating to the earnest young
assistant of Professor Gottlieb.

"I am Dr. Arrowsmith," he snorted, "and I've been informed
that even probationers learn that the first duty of a nurse is to
stand when addressing doctors! I wish to find Ward D, to take
a strain of — it may interest you to \nowl — a very dangerous
microbe, and if you will kindly direct me — "

"Oh, gee, I've been getting fresh again. I don't seem to get
along with this military discipline. All right. I'll stand up." She
did. Her every movement was swiftly smooth as the running
of a cat. "You go back, turn right, then left. I'm sorry I was
fresh. But if you saw some of the old muffs of doctors that a
nurse has to be meek to — Honestly, Doctor — if you are a
doctor — "

"I don't see that I need to convince you!" he raged, as he
stalked off. All the way to Ward D he was furious at her veiled*
derision. He was an eminent scientist, and it was outrageous
that he should have to endure impudence from a probationer —
a singularly vulgar probationer, a thin and slangy young woman
apparently from the West. He repeated his rebuke: "I don't see
that I need to convince you." He was proud of himself for hav-
ing been lofty. He pictured himself telling Madeline about it,
concluding, "I just said to her quietly, 'My dear young woman,
I don't know that you are the person to whom I have to explain
my mission here,' I said, and she wilted."

But her image had not wilted, when he had found the intern
who was to help him and had taken the spinal fluid. She was
before him, provocative, enduring. He had to see her again, and
convince her — "Take a better man than she is, better man than
I've ever met, to get away with being insulting to me!" said
the modest young scientist.

57

He had raced back to her room and they were staring at each
other before it came to him that he had not worked out the
crushing things he was going to say. She had risen from her
scrubbing. She had taken of? her turban, and her hair was silky
and honey-colored, her eyes were blue, her face childish. There
was nothing of the slavey in her. He could imagine her running
down hillsides, shinning up a stack of straw.

"Oh," she said gravely. "I didn't mean to be rude then. I was
just — Scrubbing makes me bad-tempered. I thought you were
awfully nice, and I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did
seem so young for a doctor."

"I'm not. I'm a medic. I was showing off."

"So was I!"

He felt an instant and complete comradeship with her, a rela-
tion free from the fencing and posing of his struggle with Made-
line. He knew that this girl was of his own people. If she was
vulgar, jocular, unreticent, she was also gallant, she was full of
laughter at humbugs, she was capable of a loyalty too casual and
natural to seem heroic. His voice was lively, though his words
were only :

"Pretty hard, this training for nursing, I guess."

"Not so awful, but it's just as romantic as being a hired girl —
that's what we call 'em in Dakota."

"Come from Dakota?"

"I come from the most enterprising town — three hundred and
sixty-two inhabitants — in the entire state of North Dakota —
Wheatsylvania. Are you in the U. medic school?"

To a passing nurse, the two youngsters would have seemed
absorbed in hospital business. Martin stood at the door, she by
her scrubbing pail. She had reassumed her turban; its bagginess
obscured her bright hair.

"Yes, I'm a Junior medic in Mohalis. But — I don't know. I'm
not much of a medic. I like the lab side. I think I'll be a bac-
teriologist, and raise Cain with some of the fool theories of
immunology. And I don't think much of the bedside manner."

"I'm glad you don't. You get it here. You ought to hear some
of the docs that are the sweetest old pussies with their patients —
the way they bawl out the nurses. But labs — they seem sort of
real. I don't suppose you can bluff a bacteria — what is it?—'
bacterium?"

58

"No, they're— What do they call you?"

"Me? Oh, it's an idiotic name — Leora Tozer."

"What's the matter with Leora? It's fine."

Sound of mating birds, sound of spring blossoms dropping
in the tranquil air, the bark of sleepy dogs at midnight; who
is to set them down and make them anything but hackneyed?
And as natural, as conventional, as youthfully gauche, as eter-
nally beautiful and authentic as those ancient sounds was the
talk of Martin and Leora in that passionate half-hour when each
found in the other a part of his own self, always vaguely missed,
discovered now with astonished joy. They rattled like hero and
heroine of a sticky tale, like sweat-shop operatives, like bounc-
ing rustics, like prince and princess. Their words were silly and
inconsequential, heard one by one, yet taken together ihey were
as wise and important as the tides or the sounding wind.

He told her that he admired Max Gottlieb, that he had crossed
her North Dakota on a train, and that he was an excellent
hockey-player. She told him that she "adored" vaudeville, that
her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, was born in the East (by
which she meant Illinois), and that she didn't particularly care
for nursing. She had no especial personal ambition; she had
come here because she liked adventure. She hinted, with deb-
onair regret, that she was not too popular with the superintend-
ent of nurses; she meant to be good but somehow she was al-
ways dragged into rebellions connected with midnight fudge or
elopements. There was nothing heroic in her story but from her
placid way of telling it he had an impression of gay courage.

He interrupted with an urgent, "When can you get away
from the hospital for dinner? Tonight?"

"Why—"

"Please!"

"All right."

"When can I call for your"

"Do you think I ought to — Well, seven."

All the way back to Mohalis he alternately raged and rejoiced.
He informed himself that he was a moron to make this long
trip into Zenith twice in one day; he remembered that he was
engaged to a girl called Madeline Fox; he worried the matter
of unfaithfulness; he asserted that Leora Tozer was merely an
imitation nurse who was as illiterate as a kitchen wench and as

59

impertinent as a newsboy; he decided, several times he decided,
to telephone her and free himself from the engagement.

He was at the hospital at a quarter to seven.

He had to wait for twenty minutes in a reception-room like
that of an undertaker. He was in a panic. What was he doing
here? She'd probably be agonizingly dull, through a whole long
dinner. Would he even recognize her, in mufti ? Then he leaped
up. She was at the door. Her sulky blue uniform was gone; she
was childishly slim and light in a princess frock that was a
straight line from high collar and soft young breast to her feet.
It seemed natural to tuck her hand under his arm as they left
the hospital. She moved beside him with a little dancing step,
shyer now than she had been in the dignity of her job but look-
ing up at him with confidence.

"Glad I came?" he demanded.

She thought it over. She had a trick of gravely thinking over
obvious questions; and gravely (but with the gravity of a child,
not the ponderous gravity of a politician or an office-manager)
she admitted, "Yes, I am glad. I was afraid you'd go and get
sore at me because I was so fresh, and I wanted to apologize
and — I liked your being so crazy about your bacteriology. I
think I'm a little crazy, too. The interns here — they come both-
ering around a lot, but they're so sort of — so sort of soggy, with
their new stethoscopes and their brand-new dignity. Oh — " Most
gravely of all: "Oh, gee, yes, I'm glad you came. . . . Am I an
idiot to admit it?"

"You're a darling to admit it." He was a little dizzy with her.
He pressed her hand with his arm.

"You won't think I let every medic and doctor pick me up,
will you?"

"Leora! And you don't think I try and pick up every pretty
girl I meet? I liked — I felt somehow we two could be chums.
Can't we? Can't we?"

"I don't know. We'll see. Where are we going for dinner?"

"The Grand Hotel."

"We are not! It's terribly expensive. Unless you're awfully
rich. You aren't, are you?"

"No, I'm not. Just enough money to get through medic school.
But I want—"

"Let's go to the Bijou. It's a nice place, and it isn't expensive."

60

He remembered how often Madeline Fox had hinted that it
would be a tasty thing to go to the Grand, Zenith's most re-
splendent hotel, but that was the last time he thought of Made-
line that evening. He was absorbed in Leora. He found in her
a casualness, a lack of prejudice, a directness, surprising in the
daughter of Andrew Jackson Tozer. She was feminine but un-
demanding; she was never Improving and rarely shocked; she
was neither flirtatious nor cold. She was indeed the first girl to
whom he had ever talked without self-consciousness. It is doubt-
ful if Leora herself had a chance to say anything, for he poured
out his every confidence as a disciple of Gottlieb. To Madeline,
Gottlieb was a wicked old man who made fun of the sanctities
of Marriage and Easter lilies, to Clif, he was a bore, but Leora
glowed as Martin banged the table and quoted his idol: "Up
to the present, even in the work of Ehrlich, most research has
been largely a matter of trial and error, the empirical method,
which is the opposite of the scientific method, by which one
seeks to establish a general law governing a group of phenomena
so that he may predict what will happen."

He intoned it reverently, staring across the table at her, almost
glaring at her. He insisted, "Do you see where he leaves all these
detail-grubbing, machine-made researchers buzzing in the ma-
nure heap just as much as he does the commercial docs? Do you
get him? Do you?"

"Yes, I think I do. Anyway, I get your enthusiasm for him.
But please don't bully me so!"

"Was I bullying? I didn't mean to. Only, when I get to think-
ing about the way most of these damned profs don't even know
what he's up to — "

Martin was off again, and if Leora did not altogether under-
stand the relation of the synthesis of antibodies to the work of
Arrhenius, yet she listened with comfortable pleasure in his zeal,
with none of Madeline Fox's gently corrective admonitions.

She had to warn him that she must be at the hospital by ten.

"I've talked too much! Lord, I hope I haven't bored you," he
blurted.

"I loved it."

"And I was so technical, and so noisy — Oh, I am a. chump!"

"I like having you trust me. I'm not 'earnest,' and I haven't
any brains whatever, but I do love it when my menfolks think

61

I'm intelligent enough to hear what they really think and —
Good night!"

They dined together twice in two weeks, and only twice in
that time, though she telephoned to him, did Martin see his
honest affianced, Madeline.

He came to know all of Leora's background. Her bed-ridden
grand-aunt in Zenith, who was her excuse for coming so far to
take hospital training. The hamlet of Wheatsylvania, North
Dakota; one street of shanties with the red grain-elevators at
the end. Her father, Andrew Jackson Tozer, sometimes known
as Jackass Tozer; owner of the bank, of the creamery, and an
elevator, therefore the chief person in town; pious at Wednes-
day evening prayer-meeting, fussing over every penny he gave
to Leora or her mother. Bert Tozer, her brother; squirrel teeth,
a gold eye-glass chain over his ear, cashier and all the rest of the
staff in the one-room bank owned by his father. The chicken
salad and coffee suppers at the United Brethren Church; Ger-
man Lutheran farmers singing ancient Teutonic hymns; the
Hollanders, the Bohemians and Poles. And round about the vil-
lage, the living wheat, arched above by tremendous clouds. He
saw Leora, always an "odd child/' doing obediently enough the
flat household tasks but keeping snug the belief that some day
she would find a youngster with whom, in whatever danger or
poverty, she would behold all the colored world.

It was at the end of her hesitating effort to make him see her
childhood that he cried, "Darling, you don't have to tell me
about you. I've always known you. I'm not going to let you go,
no matter what. You're going to marry me — "

They said it with clasping hands, confessing eyes, in that
blatant restaurant. Her first words were:

"I want to call you 'Sandy.' Why do I? I don't know why.
You're as unsandy as can be, but somehow 'Sandy' means you
to me and — Oh, my dear, I do like you!"

Martin went home engaged to two girls at once.

IV

He had promised to see Madeline the next morning.
By any canon of respectable behavior he should have felt like
a low dog; he assured himself that he must feel like a low dog;

62

but he could not bring it off. He thought of Madeline's pathetic
enthusiasms: her "Provencal pleasaunce" and the limp-leather
. volumes of poetry which she patted with fond finger-tips; of
the tie she had bought for him, and her pride in his hair when
he brushed it like the patent-leather heroes in magazine illustra-
tions. He mourned that he had sinned against loyalty. But his
agitation broke against the solidity of his union with Leora.
Her companionship released his soul. Even when, as advocate
for Madeline, he pleaded that Leora was a trivial young woman
who probably chewed gum in private and certainly was careless
about her nails in public, her commonness was dear to the com-
monness that was in himself, valid as ambition or reverence, an
earthy base to her gaiety as it was to his nervous scientific
curiosity.

He was absent-minded in the laboratory, that fatal next day.
Gottlieb had twice to ask him whether he had prepared the new
batch of medium, and Gottlieb was an autocrat, sterner with
his favorites than with the ruck of students. He snarled, "Arrow-
smith, you are a moon-calf! My God, am I to spend my life with
Dummkppje? I cannot be always alone, Martin! Are you going
to fail me? Two, three days now you haf not been keen about
work."

Martin went off mumbling, "I love that man!" In his tangled
mood he catalogued Madeline's pretenses, her nagging, her self-
ishness, her fundamental ignorance. He worked himself up to
a state of virtue in which it was agreeably clear to him that he
must throw Madeline over, entirely as a rebuke. He went to her
in the evening prepared to blaze out at her first complaining, to
forgive her finally, but to break their engagement and make life
resolutely simple again.

She did not complain.

She ran to him. "Dear, you're so tired — your eyes look tired.
Have you been working frightfully hard? I've been so sorry you
couldn't come 'round, this week. Dear, you mustn't kill your-
self. Think of all the years you have ahead to do splendid things
in. No, don't talk. I want you to rest. Mother's gone to the
movies. Sit here. See, I'll make you so comfy with these pillows.
Just lean back — go to sleep if you want to — and I'll read you
The Crock of Gold.' You'll love it."

He was determined that he would not love it and, as he prob-

63

ibly had no sense of humor whatever, it is doubtful whether
he appreciated it, but its differentness aroused him. Though
Madeline's voice was shrill and cornfieldish after Leora's lazy
softness, she read so eagerly that he was sick ashamed of his
intention to hurt her. He saw that it was she, with her pre-
tenses, who was the child, and the detached and fearless Leora .
who was mature, mistress of a real world. The reproofs with
which he had planned to crush her vanished.

Suddenly she was beside him, begging, "I've been so lonely
for you, all week!"

So he was a traitor to both women. It was Leora who had
intolerably roused him; it was really Leora whom he was caress-
ing now; but it was Madeline who took his hunger to herself,
and when she whimpered, "I'm so glad you're glad to be here,"
he could say nothing. He wanted to talk about Leora, to shout
about Leora, to exult in her, his woman. He dragged out a few
sound but unimpassioned flatteries; he observed that Madeline
was a handsome young woman and a sound English scholar;
and while she gaped with disappointment at his lukewarmness,
he got himself away, at ten. He had finally succeeded very well
indeed in feeling like a low dog.

He hastened to Clif Clawson.

He had told Clif nothing about Leora. He resented Clif's
probable scoffing. He thought well of himself for the calmness
with which he came into their room. Clif was sitting on the
small of his back, shoeless feet upon the study table, reading a
Sherlock Holmes story which rested on the powerful volume of
Osier's Medicine which he considered himself to be reading.

"Clif! Want a drink. Tired. Let's sneak down to Barney's and
see if we can rustle one."

"Thou speakest as one having tongues and who putteth the
speed behind the ole rhombencephalon comprising the cerebel-
lum and the medulla oblongata."

"Oh, cut out the cuteness! I'm in a bad temper."

"Ah, the laddie has been having a scrap with his chaste lil
Madeline! Was she horrid to ickly Marty kins? All right. I'll
quit. Come on. Yoicks for the drink."

He told three new stories about Professor Robertshaw, all of
them scurrilous and most of them untrue, on their way, and he
almost coaxed Martin into cheerfulness. "Barney's" was a pool-

64

room, a tobacco shop and, since Mohalis was dry by local option,
an admirable blind-pig. Clif and the hairy-handed Barney
greeted each other in a high and worthy manner:

"The benisons of eventide to you, Barney. May your circula-
tion proceed unchecked and particularly the dorsal carpal branch
of the ulnar artery, in which connection, comrade, Prof. Dr. Col.
Egbert Arrowsmith and I would fain trifle with another bottle
of that renowned strawberry pop."

"Gosh, Clif, you cer'nly got a swell line of jaw-music. If I ever
need a' arm amputated when you get to be a doc, I'll come
around and let you talk it ofr". Strawberry pop, gents?"

The front room of Barney's was an impressionistic painting
in which a pool-table, piles of cigarettes, chocolate bars, playing
cards, and pink sporting papers were jumbled in chaos. The
back room was simpler: cases of sweet and thinly flavored soda,
a large ice-box, and two small tables with broken chairs. Barney
poured, from a bottle plainly marked Ginger Ale, two glasses
of powerful and appallingly raw whisky, and Clif and Martin
took them to the table in the corner. The effect was swift.
Martin's confused sorrows turned to optimism. He told Clif that
he was going to write a book exposing idealism, but what he
meant was that he was going to do something clever about his
dual engagement. He had it! He would invite Leora and Made-
line to lunch together, tell them the truth, and see which of
them loved him. He whooped, and had another whisky; he
told Clif that he was a fine fellow, and Barney that he was a
public benefactor, and unsteadily he retired to the telephone,
which was shut of? from public hearing in a closet.

At the Zenith General Hospital he got the night superintend-
ent, and the night superintendent was a man frosty and sus-
picious. "This is no time to be calling up a probationer! Half-
past eleven! Who are you, anyway?"

Martin checked the "I'll damn' soon tell you who I am!"
which was his natural reaction, and explained that he was
speaking for Leora's invalid grand-aunt, that the poor old lady
was very low, and if the night superintendent cared to take
upon himself the murder of a blameless gentlewoman —

When Leora came to the telephone he said quickly, and so-
berly now, feeling as though he had come from the menace of
thronging strangers into the security of her presence:

65

"Leora ? Sandy. Meet me Grand lobby tomorrow, twelve-thirty.
Must! Important! Fix 't somehow — your aunt's sick."

"All right, dear. G' night," was all she said.

It took him long minutes to get an answer from Madeline's
flat, then Mrs. Fox's voice sounded, sleepily, quaveringly:

"Yes, yes?"

" 'S Martin."

"Who is it? Who is it? What is it? Are you calling the Fox
apartment?"

"Yes, yes! Mrs. Fox, it's Martin Arrowsmith speaking."

"Oh. oh, my dear! The 'phone woke me out of a sound sleep,
and I couldn't make out what you were saying. I was so fright-
ened. I thought maybe it was a telegram or something. I thought
perhaps something had happened to Maddy's brother. What is it,
dear? Oh, I do hope nothing's happened!"

Her confidence in him, the affection of this uprooted old
woman bewildered in a strange land, overcame him; he lost all
his whisky-colored feeling that he was a nimble fellow, and in
a melancholy way, with all the weight of life again upon him,
he sighed that no, nothing had happened, but he'd forgotten to
tell Madeline something — so shor — so sorry call so late — could Le
speak Mad just minute —

Then Madeline was bubbling, "Why, Marty dear, what is it?
I do hope nothing has happened! Why, dear, you just left
here—"

"Listen, d-dear. Forgot to tell you. There's a — there's a great
friend of mine in Zenith that I want you to meet — "

"Who is he?"

"You'll see tomorrow. Listen, I want you come in and meet —
come meet um at lunch. Going," with ponderous jocularity,
"going to blow you all to a swell feed at the Grand — "

"Oh, how nice!"

" — so I want you to meet me at the eleven-forty interurban,
at College Square. Can you?"

Vaguely, "Oh, I'd love to but — I have an eleven o'clock, and
I don't like to cut it, and I promised May Harmon to go shop-
ping with her — she's looking for some kind of shoes that you
can wear with her pink crepe de chine but that you can walk
in — and we sort of thought maybe we might lunch at Ye Kol-
lege Karavanserai — and I'd half planned to go to the movies

66

with her or somebody, Mother says that new Alaska film is
simply dandy, she saw it tonight, and I thought I might go see
it before they take it off, though Heaven knows I ought to come
right home and study and not go anywhere at all — "

"Now listen! It's important. Don't you trust me? Will you
come or not?"

"Why, of course I trust you, dear. All right, I'll try to be there.
The eleven-forty?"

"Yes."

"At College Square? Or at Bluthman's Book Shop?"

"At College Square!"

Her gentle "I trust you" and her wambling "I'll try to" were
warring in his ears as he plunged out of the suffocating cell and
returned to Clif.

"What's the grief?" Clif wondered. "Wife passed away? Or
did the Giants win in the ninth? Barney, our wandering-boy-
tonight looks like a necropsy. Slip him another strawberry pop,
quick. Say, Doctor, I think you better call a physician."

"Oh, shut up," was all Martin had to say, and that without
conviction. Before telephoning he had been full of little bright-
nesses; he had praised Clif's pool-playing and called Barney "old
Cirnex lectularius" ; but now, while the affectionate Clif worked
on him, he sat brooding save when he grumbled (with a return
of self-satisfaction), "If you knew all the troubles I have — all
the doggone mess a fellow can get into — you'd feel down in the
mouth!"

Clif was alarmed. "Look here, old socks. If you've gotten in
debt, I'll raise the cash, somehow. If it's — Been going a little
too far with Madeline?"

"You make me sick! You've got a dirty mind. I'm not worthy
to touch Madeline's hand. I regard her with nothing but respect."

"The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh, wish
there was something I could do for you. Oh! Have 'nother shot!
Barney! Come a-runnin'!"

By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness,
and Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to
fight three large academic sophomores. But in the morning he
awoke with a crackling skull and a realization that he was going
to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.

67

His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a
visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not
merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole grim
thirty minutes were present at the same time. While he was
practicing the tactful observation he was going to present two
minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy thing he had
said two minutes before. He fought to keep her attention from
the "great friend of his" whom they were to meet. With fatuous
beaming he described a night at Barney's; without any success
whatever he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him
on the evils of liquor and the evils of association with immoral
persons, he was for once relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.

"Who is this man we're going to see? What are you so mys-
terious about? Oh, Martykins, is it a joke? Aren't we going to
meet anybody? Did you just want to run away from Mama
for a while and we have a bat at the Grand together? Oh, what
fun! I've always wanted to lunch at the Grand. Of course I do
think it's too sort of rococo, but still, it is impressive, and — Did
I guess it, darling?"

"No, there's someone — Oh, we're going to meet somebody,
all right!"

"Then why don't you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you
make me impatient."

"Well, I'll tell you. It isn't a Him; it's a Her."

"Oh!"

"It's — You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and
some of the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully help-
ful." He was panting. His eyes ached. Since the torture of the
coming lunch was inevitable, he wondered why he should go
on trying to resist his punishment. "Especially there's one nurse
there who's a wonder. She's learned so much about the care of
the sick, and she puts me onto a lot of good stunts, and she
seems like a nice girl — Miss Tozer, her name is — I think her
first name is Lee or something like that — and she's so — her
father is one of the big men in North Dakota — awfully rich —
big banker— I guess she just took up nursing to do her share
in the world's work." He had achieved Madeline's own tone of
poetic uplift. "I thought you two might like to know each other.

68

You remember you were saying how few girls there are in
Mohalis that really appreciate — appreciate ideals."

"Ye-es." Madeline gazed at something far away and, whatever
it was, she did not like it. "I shall be ver' pleased to meet her,
of course. Any friend of yours — Oh, Mart! I do hope you don't
flirt; I hope you don't get too friendly with all these nurses. I
don't know anything about it, of course, but I keep hearing how
some of these nurses are regular man-hunters."

"Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn't!"

"No, I'm sure, but — Oh, Martykins, you won't be silly and
let these nurses just amuse themselves with you? I mean, for
your own sake. They have such an advantage. Poor Madeline,
she wouldn't be allowed to go hanging around men's .rooms
learning — things, and you think you're so psychological, Mart,
but honestly, any smart woman can twist you around her finger."

"Well, I guess I can take care of myself!"

"Oh, I mean — I don't mean — But I do hope this Tozer per-
son— I'm sure I shall like her, if you do, but — I am your own
true love, aren't I, always!"

She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his
hand. She sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflections
on Leora turned into misery. Incidentally, her thumb was goug-
ing painfully into the back of his hand. He tried to look tender
as he protested, "Sure — sure — gosh, honest, Mad, look out. That
old dufler across the aisle is staring at us."

For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was ade-
quately punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.

The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith. It was com-
pared by traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the Palmer
House, the West Hotel. It has been humbled since by the super-
cilious modesty of the vast Hotel Thornleigh; dirty now is its
tessellated floor and all the wild gilt tarnished, and in its pon-
derous leather chairs are torn seams and stogie ashes and horse-
dealers. But in its day it was the proudest inn between Chicago
and Pittsburgh; an oriental palace, the entrance a score of brick
Moorish arches, the lobby towering from a black and white
marble floor, up past gilt iron balconies, to the green, pink, pearl,
and amber skylight seven stories above.

They found Leora in the lobby, tiny on an enormous couch
built round a pillar. She stared at Madeline, quiet, waiting.

69

Martin perceived that Leora was unusually sloppy — his own
word. It did not matter to him how clumsily her honey-colored
hair was tucked under her black hat, a characterless little mush-
room of a hat, but he did see and resent the contrast between
her shirtwaist, with the third button missing, her checked skirt,
her unfortunate bright brown bolero jacket, and Madeline's
sleekness of blue serge. The resentment was not toward Leora.
Scanning them together (not haughtily, as the choosing and
lofty male, but anxiously) he was more irritated than ever by
Madeline. That she should be better dressed was an affront. His
affection flew to guard Leora, to wrap and protect her.

And all the while he was bumbling:

" — thought you two girls ought know each other — Miss Fox,
want t' make you 'quainted with Miss Tozer — little celebration
— lucky dog have two Queens of Sheba — "

And to himself, "Oh, hell!"

While they murmured nothing in particular to each other he
herded them into the famous dining-room of the Grand. It was
full of gilt chandeliers, red plush chairs, heavy silverware, and
aged Negro retainers with gold and green waistcoats. Round
the walls ran select views of Pompeii, Venice, Lake Como, and
Versailles.

"Swell room!" chirped Leora.

Madeline had looked as though she intended to say the same
thing in longer words, but she considered the frescoes all over
again and explained, "Well, it's very large — "

He was ordering, with agony. He had appropriated four dol-
lars for the orgy, strictly including the tip, and his standard of
good food was that he must spend every cent of the four dol-
lars. While he wondered what "Puree St. Germain" could be,
and the waiter hideously stood watching behind his shoulder,
Madeline fell to. She chanted with horrifying politeness:

"Mr. Arrowsmith tells me you are a nurse, Miss — Tozer."

"Yes, sort of."

"Do you find it interesting?"

"Well — yes — yes, I think it's interesting."

"I suppose it must be wonderful to relieve suffering. Of course
my work — I'm taking my Doctor of Philosophy degree in Eng-
lish— " She made it sound as though she were taking her earl-
dom— "it's rather dry and detached. I have to master the growth

70

of the language and so on and so forth. With your practical
training, I suppose you'd find that rather stupid."

"Yes, it must be — no, it must be very interesting."

"Do you come from Zenith, Miss — Tozer?"

"No, I come from — Just a little town. Well, hardly a
town. . . . North Dakota."

"Oh! North Dakota!"

"Yes Way West."

"Oh, yes. . . . Are you staying East for some time?" It was
precisely what a much-resented New York cousin had once said
to Madeline.

"Well, I don't — Yes, I guess I may be here quite some time."

"Do you, uh, do you find you like it here?"

"Oh, yes, it's pretty nice. These big cities — So much to see."

" 'Big' ? Well, I suppose it all depends on the point of view,
doesn't it? I always think of New York as big but — Of course —
Do you find the contrast to North Dakota interesting?"

"Well, of course it's different."

"Tell me what North Dakota's like. I've always wondered
about these Western states." It was Madeline's second plagiarisrk
of her cousin. "What is the general impression it makes on you?"

"I don't think I know just how you mean."

"I mean what is the general effect? The — impression."

"Well, it's got lots of wheat and lots of Swedes."

"But I mean — I suppose you're all terribly virile and energetic,
compared with us Easterners."

"I don't — Well, yes, maybe."

"Have you met lots of people in Zenith?"

"Not so awfully many."

"Oh, have you met Dr. Birchall, that operates in your hos-
pital? He's such a nice man, and not just a good surgeon but
frightfully talented. He sings won-derfully, and he comes from
the most frightfully nice family."

"No, I don't think I've met him yet," Leora bleated.

"Oh, you must. And he plays the slickest — the most gorgeous
game of tennis. He always goes to all these millionaire parties
on Royal Ridge. Frightfully smart."

Martin now first interrupted. "Smart? Him? He hasn't got '
any brains whatever."

"My dear child, I didn't mean 'smart' in that sense!" He sat

7i

alone and helpless while she again turned on Leora and ever
more brightly inquired whether Leora knew this son of a cor-
poration lawyer and that famous debutante, this hatshop and
that club. She spoke familiarly of what were known as the Lead-
ers of Zenith Society, the personages who appeared daily in the
society columns of the Advocate-Times, the Cowxes and Van
Antrims and Dodsworths. Martin was astonished by the famil-
iarity; he remembered that she had once gone to a charity ball
in Zenith but he had not known that she was so intimate with
the peerage. Certainly Leora had appallingly never heard of
these great ones, nor ever attended the concerts, the lectures, the
recitals at which Madeline apparently spent all her glittering
evenings.

Madeline shrugged a little, then, "Well — Of course with the
fascinating doctors and everybody that you meet in the hospital,
I suppose you'd find lectures frightfully tame. Well — " She dis-
missed Leora and looked patronizingly at Martin. "Are you
planning some more work on the what-is-it with rabbits?"

He was grim. He could do it now, if he got it over quickly.
"Madeline! Brought you two together because — Don't know
whether you cotton to each other or not, but I wish you could,
because I've — I'm not making any excuses for myself. I couldn't
help it. I'm engaged to both of you, and I want to know — "

Madeline had sprung up. She had never looked quite so proud
and fine. She stared at them, and walked away, wordless. She
came back, she touched Leora's shoulder, and quietly kissed her.
"Dear, I'm sorry for you. You've got a job! You poor baby!"
She strode away, her shoulders straight.

Hunched, frightened, Martin could not look at Leora.

He felt her hand on his. He looked up. She was smiling,
easy, a little mocking. "Sandy, I warn you that I'm never going
to give you up. I suppose you're as bad as She says; I suppose
I'm foolish — I'm a hussy. But you're mine! I warn you it isn't
a bit of use your getting engaged to somebody else again. I'd
tear her eyes out! Now don't think so well of yourself! I guess
you're pretty selfish. But I don't care. You're mine!"

He said brokenly many things beautiful in their commonness.

She pondered, "I do feel we're nearer together than you and
Her. Perhaps you like me better because you can bully me —
because I tag after you and She never would. And I know your

72

work is more important to you than I am, maybe more impor-
tant than you are. But I am stupid and ordinary and She isn't.
I simply admire you frightfully (Heaven knows why, but I do),
while She has sense enough to make you admire Her and tag
after Her."

"No! I swear it isn't because I can bully you, Leora — I swear
it isn't — I don't think it is. Dearest, don't don't think she's
brighter than you are. She's glib but — Oh, let's stop talking!
I've found you! My life's begun!"

73

CHAPTER VII

THE difference between Martin's relations to Madeline and
to Leora was the difference between a rousing duel and a
serene comradeship. From their first evening, Leora and
he depended on each other's loyalty and liking, and certain
things in his existence were settled forever. Yet his absorption
in her was not stagnant. He was always making discoveries
about the observations of life which she kept incubating in her
secret little head whiie she made smoke rings with her cigarettes
and smiled silently. He longed for the girl Leora; she stirred
him, and with gay frank passion she answered him; but to an-
other, sexless Leora he talked more honestly than to Gottlieb
or his own worried self, while with her boyish nod or an occa-
sional word she encouraged him to confidence in his evolving
ambition and disdains.

Digamma Pi fraternity was giving a dance. It was understood
among the anxiously whispering medics that so cosmopolitan
was the University of Winnemac becoming that they were ex-
pected to wear the symbols of respectability known as "dress-
suits." On the solitary and nervous occasion when Martin had
worn evening clothes he had rented them from the Varsity
Pantorium, but he must own them, now that he was going to
introduce Leora to the world as his pride and flowering. Like
two little old people, absorbed in each other and diffidently ex-
ploring new, unwelcoming streets of the city where their alien-
ated children live, Martin and Leora edged into the garnished
magnificence of Benson, Hanley and Koch's, the loftiest depart-
ment store in Zenith. She was intimidated by the luminous cases
of mahogany and plate glass, by the opera hats and lustrous

74

mufflers and creamy riding breeches. When he had tried on a
dinner suit and come out for her approval, his long brown tie
and soft-collared shirt somewhat rustic behind the low evening
waistcoat, and when the clerk had gone to fetch collars, she
wailed:

"Darn it, Sandy, you're too grand for me. I just simply can't
get myself to fuss over my clothes, and here you're going to go
and look so spifTy I won't have a chance with you."

He almost kissed her.

The clerk, returning, warbled, "I think, Modom, you'll find
that your husband will look vurry nice indeed in these wing
collars."

Then, while the clerk sought ties, he did kiss her, and she
sighed :

4'Oh, gee, you're one of these people that get ahead. I never
thought I'd have to live up to a man with a dress-suit and a
come-to-Heaven collar. Oh, well, I'll tag!"

in

For the Digamma Ball, the University Armory was extremely
decorated. The brick walls were dizzy with bunting, spotty
with paper chrysanthemums and plaster skulls and wooden
scalpels ten feet long.

In six years at Mohalis, Martin had gone to less than a score
of dances, though the refined titillations of communal embrac-
ing were the chief delight of the co-educational university. When
he arrived at the Armory, with Leora timorously brave in a
blue crepe de chine made in no recognized style, he did not care
whether he had a single two-step, though he did achingly de-
sire to have the men crowd in and ask Leora, admire her and
make her welcome. Yet he was too proud to introduce her about,
lest he seem to be begging his friends to dance with her. They
stood alone, under the balcony, disconsolately facing the vastness
of the floor, while beyond them flashed the current of dancers,
beautiful, formidable, desirable. Leora and he had assured each
other that, for a student affair, dinner jacket and black waist-
coat would be the thing, as stated in the Benson, Hanley and
Koch Chart of Correct Gents' Wearing Apparel, but he grew
miserable at the sight of voluptuous white waistcoats, and when

75

that embryo famous surgeon, Angus Duer, came by, disdainful
as a greyhound and pushing on white gloves (which are the
whitest, the most superciliously white objects on earth), then
Martin felt himself a hobbledehoy.

"Come on, we'll dance," he said, as though it were a defiance
to all Angus Duers.

He very much wanted to go home.

He did not enjoy the dance, though she waltzed easily and
himself not too badly. He did not even enjoy having her in his
arms. He could not believe that she was in his arms. As they
revolved he saw Duer join a brilliance of pretty girls and distin-
guished-looking women about the great Dr. Silva, dean of the
medical school. Angus seemed appallingly at home, and he
waltzed off with the prettiest girl, sliding, swinging, deft. Martin
tried to hate him as a fool, but he remembered that yesterday
Angus had been elected to the honorary society of Sigma Xi.

Leora and he crept back to the exact spot beneath the balcony
where they had stood before, to their den, their one safe refuge.
While he tried to be nonchalant and talk up to his new clothes,
he was cursing, the men he saw go by laughing with girls, ignor-
ing his Leora.

"Not many here yet," he fussed. "Pretty soon they'll all be
coming, and then you'll have lots of dances."

"Oh, I don't mind."

("God, won't somebody come and ask the poor kid?")

He fretted over his. lack of popularity among the dancing-
men of the medical school. He wished Clif Clawson were pres-
ent— Clif liked any sort of assembly, but he could not afford
dress-clothes. Then, rejoicing as at sight of the best-beloved, he
saw Irving Watters, that paragon of professional normality, wan-
dering toward them, but Watters passed by, merely nodding.
Thrice Martin hoped and desponded, and now all his pride was
gone. If Leora could be happy —

"I wouldn't care a hoot if she fell for the gabbiest fusser in
the whole U., and gave me the go-by all evening. Anything to
let her have a good time! If I could coax Duer over — No,«that's
one thing I couldn't stand: crawling to that dirty snob — I will!"

Up ambled Fatty Pfaflf, just arrived. Martin pounced on him
lovingly. "H'lo, old Fat! You a stag tonight? Meet my friend
Miss Tozer."

76

Fatty's bulbous eyes showed approval of Leora's cheeks and
amber hair. He heaved, "Pleasedmeetch — dance starting — have
the honor?" in so flattering a manner that Martin could have
kissed him.

That he himself stood alone through the dance did not occur
to him. He leaned against a pillar and gloated. He felt gor-
geously unselfish. . . . That various girl wallflowers were sitting
near him, waiting to be asked, did not occur to him either.

He saw Fatty introduce Leora to a decorative pair of Digams,
one of whom begged her for the next. Thereafter she had more
invitations than she could take. Martin's excitement cooled. It
seemed to him that she clung too closely to her partners, that,
she followed their steps too eagerly. After the fifth dance he was
agitated. "Course! She's enjoying herself! Hasn't got time to
notice that I just stand here — yes, by thunder, and hold her
scarf! Sure! Fine for. her. Fact I might like a little dancing
myself — And the way she grins and gawps at that fool Brindle
Morgan, the — the — the damnedest — Oh, you and I are going to
have a talk, young woman! And those hounds trying to pinch
her off me — the one thing I've ever loved! Just because they
dance better than I can, and spiel a lot of foolishness — And that
damn' orchestra playing that damn' peppery music — And she
falling for all their damn' cheap compliments and — You and
I are going to have one lovely little understanding!"

When she next returned to him, besieged by three capering
medics, he muttered to her, "Oh, it doesn't matter about met"

"Would you like this one? Course you shall have it!" She
turned to him fully; she had none of Madeline's sense of having
to act for the benefit of observers. Through a strained eternity
of waiting, while he glowered, she babbled of the floor, the size
of the room, and her "dandy partners." At the sound of the
music he held out his arms.

"No," she said. "I want to talk to you." She led him to a
corner and hurled at him, "Sandy, this is the last time I'm going
to stand for your looking jealous. Oh, I know! See here! If
we're going to stick together — and we are! — I'm going to dance
with just as many men as I want to, and I'm going to be just
as foolish with 'em as I want to. Dinners and those things — I
suppose I'll always go on being a clam. Nothing to say. Bujt I
love dancing, and I'm going to do exactly what I want to, and

77

if you had any sense whatever, you'd know I don't care a hang
for anybody but you. Yours! Absolute. No matter what fool
things you do — and they'll probably be a plenty. So when you go
and get jealous on me again, you sneak off and get rid of it.
Aren't you ashamed of yourself!"

"I wasn't jealous — Yes, I was. Oh, I can't help it! I love you
so much. I'd be one fine lover, now wouldn't I, if I never got
jealous!"

"All right. Only you've got to keep it under cover. Now we'll
finish the dance."

He was her slave.

IV

It was regarded as immoral, at the University of Winnemac,
to dance after midnight, and at that hour the guests crowded
into the Imperial Cafeteria. Ordinarily it closed at eight, but
tonight it kept open till one, and developed a spirit of almost
lascivious mirth. Fatty Pfaff did a jig, another humorous student,
with a napkin over his arm, pretended to be a waiter, and a girl
(but she was much disapproved) smoked a cigarette.

At the door Clif Clawson was waiting for Martin and Leora.
He was in his familiar shiny gray suit, with a blue flannel shirt.

Clif assumed that he was the authority to whom all of Martin's
friends must be brought for judgment. He had not met Leora.
Martin had confessed his double engagement; he had explained
that Leora was unquestionably the most gracious young woman
on earth; but as he had previously used up all of his laudatory
adjectives and all of Clif's patience on the subject of Madeline,
Clif failed to listen, and prepared to dislike Leora as another
siren of morality.

He eyed her now with patronizing enmity. He croaked at
Martin, behind her back, "Good-looking kid, I will say that for
her — what's wrong with her?" When they had brought their
own sandwiches and coffee and mosaic cake from the long
counter, Clif rasped:

"Well, it's grand of a couple of dress-suit swells like you to
assassinate with me 'mid the midmosts of sartorials and Sassiety.
Gosh, it's fierce I had to miss the select pleasures of an evening
with Anxious Duer and associated highboys, and merely play a
low game of poker — in which Father deftly removed the sum

78

of six simolea, point ten, from the foregathered bums and yahoos.
Well, Leory, I suppose you and Martykins here have now rati-
ocinated all these questions of polo and, uh, Monte Carlo and
so on."

She had an immense power of accepting people as they were.
While Clif waited, leering, she placidly investigated the inside
of a chicken sandwich and assented, "Um-huh."

"Good boy! I thought you were going to pull that 'If you
are a roughneck, I don't see why you think you've got to boast
about it' stuff that Mart springs on me!"

Clif turned into a jovial and (for him) unusually quiet com-
panion. . . . Ex-farmhand, ex-book-agent, ex-mechanic, he had
so little money yet so scratching a desire to be resplendent that
he took refuge in pride in poverty, pride in being offensive.
Now, when Leora seemed to look through his boasting, he liked
her as quickly as had Martin, and they buzzed with gaiety.
Martin was warmed to benevolence toward mankind, including
Angus Duer, who was at the end of the room at a table with
Dean Silva and his silvery women. Without plan, Martin sprang
up, raced down the room. Holding out his hand he clamored:

"Angus, old man, want to congratulate you on getting Sigma
Xi. That's fine."

Duer regarded the outstretched hand as though it was an in-
strument which he had seen before but whose use he could not
quite remember. He picked it up and shook it tentatively. He
did not turn his back; he was worse than rude — he looked
patient.

"Well, good luck," said Martin, chilled and shaky.

"Very good of you. Thanks."

Martin returned to Leora and Clif, to tell them the incident
as a cosmic tragedy. They agreed that Angus Duer was to be
shot. In the midst of it Duer came past, trailing after Dean
Silva's party, and nodded to Martin, who glared back, feeling
noble and mature.

At parting, Clif held Leora's hand and urged, "Honey, I think
a lot of Mart, and one time I was afraid the old kid was going
to get tied up to — to parties that would turn him into a hand-
shaker. I'm a hand-shaker myself. I know less about medicine
than Prof Robertshaw. But this boob has some conscience to
him, and I'm so darn' glad he's playing arou/id with a girl that's

79

real folks and — Oh, listen at me fallin' all over my clumsy feet!
But I just mean I hope you won't mind Uncle Clif saying he
does by golly like you a lot!"

It was almost four when Martin returned from taking Leora
home and sagged into bed. He could not sleep. The aloofness
of Angus Duer racked him as an insult to himself, as somehow
an implied insult to Leora, but his boyish rage had passed into
a bleaker worry. Didn't Duer, for all his snobbishness and shal-
lowness, have something that he himself lacked? Didn't Clif,
with his puppy-dog humor, his speech of a vaudeville farmer,
his suspicion of fine manners as posing, take life too easily?
Didn't Duer know how to control and drive his hard little
mind? Wasn't there a technique of manners as there was of
experimentation. . . . Gottlieb's fluent bench-technique versus
the clumsy and podgy hands of Ira Hinkley. ... Or was all
this inquiry a treachery, a yielding to Duer's own affected stand-
ard?

He was so tired that behind his closed eyelids were flashes of
fire. His whirling mind flew over every sentence he had said or
heard that night, till round his twisting body there was fevered
shouting.

As he grumped across the medical campus next day, he came
unexpectedly upon Angus and he was smitten with the guilti-
ness and embarrassment one has toward a person who has bor-
rowed money and probably will not return it. Mechanically he
began to blurt "Hello," but he checked it in a croak, scowled,
and stumbled on.

"Oh, Mart," Angus called. He was dismayingly even. "Re-
member speaking to me last evening? It struck me when I was
going out that you looked huffy. I was wondering if you thought
I'd been rude. I'm sorry if you did. Fact is, I had a rotten head-
ache. Look. I've got four tickets for 'As It Listeth,' in Zenith,
next Friday evening — original New York cast! Like to see it?
And I noticed you were with a peach, at the dance. Suppose she
might like to go along with us, she and some friend of hers?"

"Why — gosh — I'll 'phone her — darn' nice of you to ask us — "

It was not till melancholy dusk, when Leora had accepted

80

and promised to bring with her a probationer-nurse named
Nelly Byers, that Martin began to brood:

"Wonder if he did have a headache last night?

"Wonder if somebody gave him the tickets?

"Why didn't he ask Dad Silva's daughter to go with us ? Does
he think Leora is some tart I've picked up?

"Sure, he never really quarrels with anybody — wants to keep
us all friendly, so we'll send him surgical patients some day
when we're hick G. P.'s and he's a Great and Only.

"Why did I crawl down so meekly?

"I don't care! If Leora enjoys it — Me personally, I don't care
two hoots for all this trotting around — Though of course it
isn't so bad to see pretty women in fine clothes, and be dressed
as good as anybody — Oh, I don't \now\"

VI

In the slightly Midwestern city of Zenith, the appearance of a
play "with the original New York cast" was an event. (What
play it was did not much matter.) The Dodsworth Theatre
was splendid with the aristocracy from the big houses on Royal
Ridge. Leora and Nelly Byers admired the bloods — graduates
of Yale and Harvard and Princeton, lawyers and bankers, motor-
manufacturers and inheritors of real estate, virtuosi of golf,
familiars of New York — who with their shrill and glistening
women occupied the front rows. Miss Byers pointed out the
Dodsworths, who were often mentioned in Town Topics.

Leora and Miss Byers bounced with admiration of the hero
when he refused the governorship; Martin worried because the
heroine was prettier than Leora; and Angus Duer (who gave
an appearance of knowing all about plays without having seen
more than half a dozen in his life) admitted that the set depict-
ing "Jack Vanduzen's Camp in the Adirondacks: Sunset, the
Next Day" was really very nice.

Martin was in a mood of determined hospitality. He was
going to give them supper and that was all there was to it. Miss
Byers explained that they had to be in the hospital by a quarter
after eleven, but Leora said lazily, "Oh, I don't care. I'll slip
in through a window. If you're there in the morning, the Old
Cat can't prove you got in late." Shaking her head at this lying

81

wickedness, Miss Byers fled to a trolley car, while Leora, Angus,
and Martin strolled to Epstein's Alt Nuremberg Cafe for beer
and Swiss cheese sandwiches flavored by the sight of German
drinking mottos and papier-mache armor.

Angus was studying Leora, looking from her to Martin,
watching their glances of affection. That a keen young man
should make a comrade of a girl who could not bring him social
advancement, that such a thing as the boy and girl passion be-
tween Martin and Leora could exist, was probably inconceivable
to him. He decided that she was conveniently frail. He gave
Martin a refined version of a leer, and set himself to acquiring
her for his own uses.

"I hope you enjoyed the play," he condescended to her.

"Oh, yes—"

"Jove, I envy you two. Of course I understand why girls fall
for Martin here, with his romantic eyes, but a grind like me,
I have to go on working without a single person to give me
sympathy. Oh, well, I deserve it for being shy of women."

With unexpected defiance from Leora: "When anybody says
that, it means they're not shy, and they despise women."

"Despise them? Why, child, honestly, I long to be a Don Juan.
But I don't know how. Won't you give me a lesson?" Angus's
aridly correct voice had become lulling; he concentrated on
Leora as he would have concentrated on dissecting a guinea pig.
She smiled at Martin now and then to say, "Don't be jealous,
idiot. I'm magnificently uninterested in this conceited hypnotist."
But she was flustered by Angus's sleek assurance, by his homage
to her eyes and wit and reticence.

Martin twitched with jealousy. He blurted that they must be
going — Leora really had to be back — The trolleys ran infre-
quently after midnight and they walked to the hospital through
hollow and sounding streets. Angus and Leora kept up a high-
strung chatter, while Martin stalked beside them, silent, sulky,
proud of being sulky. Skittering through a garage alley they
came out on the mass of Zenith General Hospital, a block long,
five stories of bleak windows with infrequent dim blotches of
light. No one was about. The first floor was but five feet from
the ground, and they lifted Leora up to the limestone ledge of a
half-open corridor window. She slid in, whispering, "G' night!
Thanks!"

82

Martin felt empty, dissatisfied. The night was full of a chill
mo urnf ulness. A light was suddenly flickering in a window
above them, and there was a woman's scream breaking down
into moans. He felt the tragedy of parting — that in the briefness
of life he should lose one moment of her living presence.

"I'm going in after her; see she gets there safe," he said.

The frigid edge of the stone sill bit his hands, but he vaulted,
thrust up his knee, crawled hastily through the window. Ahead
of him, in the cork-floored hallway lit only by a tiny electric
globe, Leora was tiptoeing toward a flight of stairs. He ran
after her, on his toes. She squeaked as he caught her arm.

"We got to say good night better than that!" he grumbled.
"With that damn Duer— "

"Ssssssh! They'd simply murder me if they caught you here.
Do you want to get me fired?"

"Would you care, if it was because of me?"

"Yes — no — well — But they'd probably fire you from medic
school, my lad. If — " His caressing hands could feel her shiver
with anxiety. She peered along the corridor, and his quickened
imagination created sneaking forms, eyes peering from door-
ways. She sighed, then, resolutely: "We can't talk here. We'll
slip ^ip to my room — roommate's away for the week. Stand
there, in the shadow. If nobody's in sight upstairs, I'll come
back."

He followed her to the floor above, to a white door, then
breathlessly inside. As he closed the door he was touched by
this cramped refuge, with its camp-beds and photographs from
home and softly wrinkled linen. He clasped her, but with hand
against his chest she forbade him, as she mourned:

"You were jealous again! How can you distrust me so? With
that fool! Women not like him? They wouldn't have a chance!
Likes himself too well. And then you jealous!"

"I wasn't — Yes, I was, but I don't dare! To have to sit there
and grin like a hyena, with him between us, when I wanted
to talk to you, to kiss you! All right! Probably I'll always be
jealous. It's you that have got to trust me. I'm not easy-going;
never will be. Oh, trust me — "

Their profound and unresisted kiss was the more blind in
memory of that barren hour with Angus. They forgot that the
superintendent of nurses might dreadfully come bursting in;

83

they forgot that Angus was waiting. "Oh, curse Angus — let him
go home!" was Martin's only reflection, as his eyes closed and
his long loneliness vanished.

"Good night, dear love — my love forever," he exulted.

In the still ghostliness of the hall, he laughed as he thought
of how irritably Angus must have marched away. But from the
window he discovered Angus huddled on the stone steps, asleep.
As he touched the ground, he whistled, but stopped short. He
saw bursting from the shadow a bulky man, vaguely in a porter's
uniform, who was shouting:

"I've caught yuh! Back you come into the hospital, and we'll
find out what you've been up to!"

They closed. Martin was wiry, but in the watchman's clasp
he was smothered. There was a reek of dirty overalls, of un-
bathed flesh. Martin kicked his shins, struck at his boulder of
red cheek, tried to twist his arm. He broke loose, started to flee,
and halted. The struggle, in its contrast to the aching sweetness
of Leora, had infuriated him. He faced the watchman, raging.

From the awakened Angus, suddenly appearing beside him,
there was a thin sound of disgust. "Oh, come on! Let's get out
of this. Why do you dirty your hands on scum like him?"

The watchman bellowed, "Oh, I'm scum, am I? I'll^show
you!"

He collared Angus and slapped him.

Under the sleepy street-lamp, Martin saw a man go mad. It
was not the unfeeling Angus Duer who stared at the watchman;
it was a killer, and his eyes were the terrible eyes of the killer,
speaking to the least experienced a message of death. He gasped
only, "He dared to touch me!" A pen-knife was somehow in his
hands, he had leaped at the watchman, and he was busily and
earnestly endeavoring to cut his throat.

As Martin tried to hold them he heard the agitated pounding
of a policeman's night stick on the pavement. Martin was slim
but he had pitched hay and strung telephone wire. He hit the
watchman, judiciously, beside the left ear, snatched Angus's
wrist, and dragged him away. They ran up an alley, across a
courtyard. They came to a thoroughfare as an owl trolley glowed
and rattled round the corner; they ran beside it, swung up on
the steps, and were safe.

Angus stood on the back platform, sobbing. "My God, I wish

84

I'd killed him! He laid his filthy hands on me! Martin! Hold
me here on the car. I thought I'd got over that. Once when I
was a kid I tried to kill a fellow — God, I wish I'd cut that filthy
swine's throat!"

As the trolley came into the center of the city, Martin coaxed,
"There's an all-night lunch up Oberlin Avenue where we can
get some white mule. Come on. It'll straighten you up."

Angus was shaky and stumbling — Angus the punctilious.
Martin led him into the lunch-room where, between catsup
bottles, they had raw whisky in granite-like coffee cups. Angus
leaned his head on his arm and sobbed, careless of stares, till he
had drunk himself into obliteration, and Martin steered him
home. Then to Martin, in his furnished room with Clif snoring,
the evening became incredible and nothing more incredible than
Angus Duer. "Well, he'll be a good friend of mine now, for
always. Fine!"

Next morning, in the hall of the Anatomy Building, he saw
Angus and rushed toward him. Angus snapped, "You were
frightfully stewed last night, Arrowsmith. If you can't handl>
your liquor better than that, you better cut it out entirely."

He walked on, clear-eyed, unruffled.

85

CHAPTER VIII

AND always Martin's work went on — assisting Max Gott-

ZA lieb, instructing bacteriological students, attending lec-
JL \* tures and hospital demonstrations — sixteen merciless
hours to the day. He stole occasional evenings for original re-
search or for peering into the stirring worlds of French and
German bacteriological publications; he went proudly now and
then to Gottlieb's cottage where, against rain-smeared brown
wall-paper, were Blake drawings and a signed portrait of Koch.
But the rest was nerve-gnawing.

Neurology, O.B., internal medicine, physical diagnosis; always
a few pages more than he could drudge through before he fell
asleep at his rickety study-table.

Memorizing of gynecology, of ophthalmology, till his mind
was burnt raw.

Droning afternoons of hospital demonstrations, among stum-
bling students barked at by tired clinical professors.

The competitive exactions of surgery on dogs, in which Angus
Duer lorded it with impatient perfection.

Martin admired the professor of internal medicine, T. J. H.
Silva, known as "Dad" Silva, who was also dean of the medical
faculty. He was a round little man with a little crescent of mus-
tache. Silva's god was Sir William Osier, his religion was the
art of sympathetic healing, and his patriotism was accurate phys-
ical diagnosis. He was a Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, grown
wiser and soberer and more sure. But Martin's reverence for
Dean Silva was counterbalanced by his detestation for Dr. Ros-
coe Geake, professor of otolaryngology.

Roscoe Geake was a peddler. He would have done well with
oil stock. As an otolaryngologist he believed that tonsils had
been placed in the human organism for the purpose of provid-

86

ing specialists with closed motors. A physician who left the
tonsils in any patient was, he felt, foully and ignorantly over-
looking his future health and comfort — the physician's future
health and comfort. His earnest feeling regarding the nasal
septum was that it never hurt any patient to have part of it
removed, and if the most hopeful examination could find noth-
ing the matter with the patient's nose and throat except that
he was smoking too much, still, in any case, the enforced rest
after an operation was good for him. Geake denounced this cant
about Letting Nature Alone. Why, the average well-to-do man
appreciated attention! He really didn't think much of his spe-
cialists unless he was operated on now and then — just a little
and not very painfully. Geake had one classic annual address
in which, winging far above otolaryngology, he evaluated all
medicine, and explained to grateful healers like Irving Watters
the method of getting suitable fees:

"Knowledge is the greatest thing in the medical world but it's
no good whatever unless you can sell it, and to do this you
must first impress your personality on the people who have the
dollars. Whether a patient is a new or an old friend, you must
always use salesmanship on him. Explain to him, also to his
stricken and anxious family, the hard work and thought you
are giving to his case, and so make him feel that the good you
have done him, or intend to do him, is even greater than the
fee you plan to charge. Then, when he gets your bill, he will
not misunderstand or kick."

There was, as yet, no vision in Martin of serene spaciousness
of the mind. Beyond doubt he was a bustling young man, and
rather shrill. He had no uplifted moments when he saw him-
self in relation to the whole world — if indeed he realized that
there was a deal of the world besides himself. His friend Clif
was boorish, his beloved Leora was rustic, however gallant she
might be, and he himself wasted energy in hectic busyness and
in astonishment at dullness. But if he had not ripened, yet he
was close to earth, he did hate pretentiousness, he did use his
hands, and he did seek iron actualities with a curiosity inextin-
guishable.

87

And at infrequent times he perceived the comedy of life; re-
laxed for a gorgeous hour from the intensity wearing to his
admirers. Such was the hour before Christmas vacation when
Roscoe Geake rose to glory.

It was announced in the Winnemac Daily News that Dr.
Geake had been called from the chair of otolaryngology to the
vice-presidency of the puissant New Idea Medical Instrument
and Furniture Company of Jersey City. In celebration he gave
a final address to the entire medical school on "The Art and
Science of Furnishing the Doctor's Office."

He was a neatly finished person, Geake, eye-glassed and en-
thusiastic and fond of people. He beamed on his loving students
and cried:

"Gentlemen, the trouble with too many doctors, even those
splendid old pioneer war-horses who through mud and storm,
through winter's chill blast and August's untempered heat, go
bringing cheer and surcease from pain to the world's humblest,
yet even these old Nestors not so infrequently settle down in
a rut and never shake themselves loose. Now that I am leaving
this field where I have labored so long and happily, I want to
ask every man jack of you to read, before you begin to practice
medicine, not merely your Rosenau and Howell and Gray, but
also, as a preparation for being that which all good citizens must
be, namely, practical men, a most valuable little manual of
modern psychology, 'How to Put Pep in Salesmanship,' by
Grosvenor A. Bibby. For don't forget, gentlemen, and this is
my last message to you, the man worth while is not merely the
man who takes things with a smile but also the man who's
trained in philosophy, practical philosophy, so that instead of
day-dreaming and spending all his time talking about 'ethics,'
splendid though they are, and 'charity,' glorious virtue though
that be, yet he never forgets that unfortunately the world judges
a man by the amount of good hard cash he can lay away. The
graduates of the University of Hard Knocks judge a physician
as they judge a business man, not merely by his alleged 'high
ideals' but by the horsepower he puts into carrying them out —
and making them pay! And from a scientific standpoint, don't
overlook the fact that the impression of properly remunerated
competence which you make on a patient is of just as much im-
portance, in these days of the new psychology, as the drugs you

88

get into him or the operations he lets you get away with. The
minute he begins to see that other folks appreciate and reward
your skill, that minute he must begin to feel your power and so
to get well.

"Nothing is more important in inspiring him than to have
such an office that as soon as he steps into it, you have begun
to sell him the idea of being properly cured. I don't care whether
a doctor has studied in Germany, Munich, Baltimore, and
Rochester. I don't care whether he has all science at his finger-
tips, whether he can instantly diagnose with a considerable de-
gree of accuracy the most obscure ailment, whether he has the
surgical technique of a Mayo, a Crile, a Blake, an Ochsner, a
Cushing. If he has a dirty old office, with hand-me-down chairs
and a lot of second-hand magazines, then the patient isn't going
to have confidence in him; he is going to resist the treatment —
and the doctor is going to have difficulty in putting over and
collecting an adequate fee.

"To go far below the surface of this matter into the funda-
mental philosophy and esthetics of office-furnishing for the doc-
tor, there are today two warring schools, the Tapestry School
and the Aseptic School, if I may venture to so denominate and
conveniently distinguish them. Both of them have their merits.
The Tapestry School claims that luxurious chairs for waiting
patients, handsome hand-painted pictures, a bookcase jammed
with the world's best literature in expensively bound sets, to-
gether with cut-glass vases and potted palms, produce an impres-
sion of that opulence which can come only from sheer ability
and knowledge. The Aseptic School, on the other hand, main-
tains that what the patient wants is that appearance of scrupu-
lous hygiene which can be produced only by furnishing the
outer waiting-room as well as the inner offices in white-painted
chairs and tables, with merely a Japanese print against a gray
wall.

"But, gentlemen, it seems obvious to me, so obvious that I
wonder it has not been brought out before, that the ideal recep-
tion-room is a combination of these two schools! Have your
potted palms and handsome pictures — to the practical physician
they are as necessary a part of his working equipment as a ster-
ilizer or a Baumanometer. But so far as possible have everything
in sanitary-looking white — and think of the color-schemes you

89

can evolve, or the good wife for you, if she be one blessed with
artistic tastes! Rich golden or red cushions, in a Morris chair
enameled the purest white! A floor-covering of white enamel,
with just a border of delicate rose! Recent and unspotted num-
bers of expensive magazines, with art covers, lying on a white
table! Gentlemen, there is the idea of imaginative salesmanship
which I wish to leave with you; there is the gospel which I hope
to spread in my fresh field of endeavor, the New Idea Instru-
ment Company of Jersey City, where at any time I shall be glad
to see and shake by the hand any and all of you."

in

Through the storm of his Christmas examinations, Martin
had an intensified need of Leora. She had been summoned home
to Dakota, perhaps for months, on the ground that her mother
was unwell, and he had, or thought he had, to see her daily.
He must have slept less than four hours a night. Grinding at
examinations on the interurban car, he dashed in to her, looking
up to scowl when he thought of the lively interns and the men
patients whom she met in the hospital, scorning himself for
being so primitive, and worrying all over again. To see her at
all, he had to wait for hours in the lobby, or walk up and down
in the snow outside till she could slip to a window and peep out.
When they were together, they were completely absorbed. She
had a genius for frank passion; she teased him, tantalized him,
but she was tender and unafraid.

He was sick lonely when he saw her of! at the Union Station.

His examination papers were competent but, save in bacteri-
ology and internal medicine, they were sketchy. He turned
emptily to the laboratory for vacation time.

He had so far displayed more emotion than achievement in
his tiny original researches. Gottlieb was patient. "It iss a fine
system, this education. All what we cram into the students, not
Koch and two dieners could learn. Do not worry about the
research. We shall do it yet." But he expected Martin to perform
a miracle or two in the whole fortnight of the holidays and
Martin had no stomach with which to think. He played in the
laboratory; he spent his time polishing glassware, and when he
transplanted cultures from his rabbits, his notes were incomplete.

90

Gottlieb was instantly grim. "Wass giebt es dann? Do you call
these notes? Always when I praise a man must he stop work-
ing? Do you think that you are a Theobald Smith or a Novy
that you should sit and meditate? You have the ability of Pfafif!"

For once, Martin was impenitent. He mumbled to himself, as
Gottlieb stamped out like a Grand Duke, "Rats, I've got some
rest coming to me. Gosh, most fellows, why, they go to swell
homes for vacation, and have dances and fathers and everything.
If Leora was here, we'd go to a show tonight."

He viciously seized his cap (a soggy and doubtful object),
sought Clif Clawson, who was spending the vacation in sleeping
between poker games at Barney's, and outlined a project of
going into town and getting drunk. It was executed so success-
fully that during vacation it was repeated whenever he thought
of the coming torture-wheel of uninspiring work, whenever he
realized that it was only Gottlieb and Leora who held him here.
After vacation, in late January, he found that whisky relieved
him from the frenzy of work, from the terror of loneliness —
then betrayed him and left him the more weary, the more lonely.
He felt suddenly old; he was twenty-four now, he reminded
himself, and a schoolboy, his real work not even begun. Clif
was his refuge; Clif admired Leora and would listen to his bab-
bling of her.

But Clif and Martin came to the misfortune of Founder's Day.

IV

January thirtieth, the birthday of the late Dr. Warburton
Stonedge, founder of the medical department of Winnemac,
was annually celebrated by a banquet rich in fraternalism and
speeches and large lack of wine. All the faculty reserved their
soundest observations for the event, and all the students were
expected to be present.

This year it was held in the large hall of the University
Y.M.C.A., a moral apartment with red wall paper, portraits of
whiskered alumni who had gone out to be missionaries, and
long thin pine boxes intended to resemble exposed oak beams.
About the famous guests — Dr. Rouncefield the Chicago surgeon,
a diabetes specialist from Omaha, a Pittsburgh internist — stood
massed the faculty members. They tried to look festal, but they

91

were worn and nervous after four months of school. They had
wrinkles and tired eyes. They were all in business suits, mostly
unpressed. They sounded scientific and interested; they used
words like phlebarteriectasia and hepatocholangio-enterostomy,
and they asked the guests, "So you just been in Rochester?
What's, uh, what're Charley and Will doing in orthopedics?"
But they were full of hunger and melancholy. It was half-past
seven, and they who did not normally dine at seven, dined at six-
thirty.

Upon this seedy gaiety entered a splendor, a tremendous black-
bearded personage, magnificent of glacial shirt-bosom, vast of
brow, wild-eyed with genius or with madness. In a marvelous
great voice, with a flavor of German accent, he inquired for Dr.
Silva, and sailed into the dean's group like a frigate among fish-
ing-smacks.

"Who the dickens is that?" wondered Martin.

"Let's edge in and find out," said Clif, and they clung to the
fast increasing knot about Dean Silva and the mystery, who was
introduced as Dr. Benoni Carr, the pharmacologist.

They heard Dr. Carr, to the pale admiration of the school-
bound assistant professors, boom genially of working with
Schmiedeberg in Germany on the isolation of dihydroxypen-
tamethylendiamin, of the possibilities of chemotherapy, of the
immediate cure of sleeping sickness, of the era of scientific heal-
ing. "Though I am American-born, I have the advantage of
speaking German from a child, and so perhaps I can better
understand the work of my dear friend Ehrlich. I saw him
receive a decoration from His Imperial Highness the Kaiser.
Dear old Ehrlich, he was like a child!"

There was at this time (but it changed curiously in 1914 and
1915) an active Germanophile section of the faculty. They bent
before this tornado of erudition. Angus Duer forgot that he was
Angus Duer; and Martin listened with excited stimulation.
Benoni Carr had all of Gottlieb's individuality, all this scorn
of machine-made teachers, all his air of a great world which
showed Mohalis as provincial, with none of Gottlieb's nervous
touchiness. Martin wished Gottlieb were present; he wondered
whether the two giants would clash.

Dr. Carr was placed at the speakers' table, near the dean.
Martin was astonished to see the eminent pharmacologist, after

92

a shocked inspection of the sour chicken and mishandled salad
which made up most of the dinner, pour something into his
water glass from a huge silver flask — and pour that something
frequently. He became boisterous. He leaned across two men
to slap the indignant dean on the shoulder; he contradicted his
neighbors; he sang a stanza of "I'm Bound Away for the Wild
Missourai."

Few phenomena at the dinner were so closely observed by
the students as the manners of Dr. Benoni Carr.

After an hour of strained festivity, when Dean Silva had risen
to announce the speakers, Carr lumbered to his feet and
shouted, "Let's not have any speeches. Only fools make speeches.
Wise men sing -jongs. Whoopee! Oh, tireolee, oh, tireolee, oh,
tireolee a lady! You profs are the bunk!"

Dean Silva was to be seen beseeching him, then leading him
out of the room, with the assistance of two professors and a foot-
ball tackle, and in the hush of a joyful horror Clif grunted to
Martin:

"Here's where I get mine! And the damn' fool promised to
stay sober!"

"Huh?"

"I might of known he'd show up stewed and spill the beans.
Oh, maybe the dean won't hand me hell proper!"

He explained. Dr. Benoni Carr was born Benno Karkowski.
He had graduated from a medical school which gave degrees
in two years. He had read vastly, but he had never been in
Europe. He had been "spieler" in medicine shows, chiropodist,
spiritualist medium, esoteric teacher, head of sanitariums for the
diversion of neurotic women. Clif had encountered him in
Zenith, when they were both drunk. It was Clif who had told
Dean Silva that the celebrated pharmacologist, just back from
Europe, was in Zenith for a few days and perhaps might accept
an invitation —

The dean had thanked Clif ardently.

The banquet ended early, and there was inadequate attention
to Dr. Rouncefield's valuable address on the Sterilization of
Catgut.

Clif sat up worrying, and admitting the truth of Martin's
several observations. Next day — he had a way with women
when he deigned to take the trouble — he pumped the dean's girl

9*

secretary, and discovered his fate. There had been a meeting of
a faculty committee; the blame for the Benoni Carr outrage had
been placed on Clif; and the dean had said all the things Clif
had imagined, with a number which he had not possessed the
talent to conceive. But the dean was not going to summon him
at once; he was going to keep him waiting in torture, then exe-
cute him in public.

"Good-by, old M.D. degree! Rats, I never thought much of
the doctor business. Guess I'll be a bond salesman," said Clif
to Martin. He strolled away, he went to the dean, and remarked:

"Oh, Dean Silva, I just dropped in to tell you I've decided to
resign from the medic school. Been offered a big job in, uh, in
Chicago, and I don't think much of the way you run the school,
anyway. Too much memorizing and too little real spirit of
science. Good luck, Doc. So long."

"Gggggg — " said Dean Silva.

Clif moved into Zenith, and Martin was left alone. He gave
up the double room at the front of his boarding-house for a
hall-room at the rear, and in that narrow den he sat and
mourned in a desolation of loneliness. He looked out on a vacant
lot in which a tattered advertisement of pork and beans flapped
on a leaning billboard. He saw Leora's eyes and heard Clifs
comfortable scoffing, and the quiet was such as he could not
endure.

9*

CHAPTER IX

THE persistent yammer of a motor horn drew Martin to
the window of the laboratory, a late afternoon in Febru-
ary. He looked down on a startling roadster, all stream-
lines and cream paint, with enormous headlights. He slowly
made out that the driver, a young man in coffee-colored loose
motor coat and hectic checked cap and intense neckwear, was
Clif Clawson, and that Clif was beckoning.
He hastened down, and Clif cried:

"Oh, boy! How do you like the boat? Do you diagnose this
suit? Scotch heather — honest! Uncle Clif has nabbed of! a
twenty-five-buck-a-week job with commissions, selling autos.
Boy, I was lost in your old medic school. I can sell anything to
anybody. In a year I'll be making eighty a week. Jump in, old
son. I'm going to take you in to the Grand and blow you to the
handsomest feed you ever stufTed into your skinny organism."
The thirty-eight miles an hour at which Clif drove into Zenith
was, in 1908, dismaying speed. Martin discovered a new Clif.
He was as noisy as ever, but more sure, glowing with schemes
for immediately acquiring large sums of money. His hair, once
bushy and greasy in front, tending to stick out jaggedly behind,
was sleek now, and his face had the pinkness of massage. He
stopped at the fabulous Grand Hotel with a jar of brakes; before
he left the car he changed his violent yellow driving-gauntlets
for a pair of gray gloves with black stitching, which he immedi-
ately removed as he paraded through the lobby. He called the
coat-girl "Sweetie," and at the dining-room door he addressed
the head-waiter:

"Ah, Gus, how's the boy, how's the boy feeling tonight?
How's the mucho famoso majordomoso? Gus, want to make
you 'quainted with Dr. Arrowsmith. Any time the doc comes

95

here I want you to shake a leg and hand him out that well-
known service^ my boy, and give him anything he wants, and
if he's broke, you charge it to me. Now, Gus, I want a nice
little table for two, with garage and hot and cold water, and
wouldst fain have thy advice, Gustavus, on the oysters and hore
durTers and all the ingredients fair of a Maecenan feast."

"Yes, sir, right this way, Mr. Clawson," breathed the head-
waiter.

Clif whispered to Martin, "I've got him like that in two
weeks! You watch my smoke!"

While Clif was ordering, a man stopped beside their table.
He resembled an earnest traveling-man who liked to get back
to his suburban bungalow every Saturday evening. He was
beginning to grow slightly bald, slightly plump. His rimless eye-
glasses, in the midst of a round smooth face, made him seem
innocent. He stared about as though he wished he had someone
with whom to dine. Clif darted up, patted the man's elbow, and
bawled :

"Ah, there, Babski, old boy. Feeding with anybody? Come
join the Sporting Gents' Association."

"All right, be glad to. Wife's out of town," said the man.

"Shake hands with Dr. Arrowsmith. Mart, meet George F.
Babbitt, the hoch-gecelebrated Zenith real-estate king. Mr. Bab-
bitt has just adorned his thirty-fourth birthday by buying his
first benzine buggy from yours truly and beg to remain as
always."

It was, at least on the part of Clif and Mr. Babbitt, a mirth-
ful affair, and when Martin had joined them in cocktails, St.
Louis beer, and highballs, he saw that Clif was the most gen-
erous person now living, and Mr. George F. Babbitt a companion
of charm.

Clif explained how certain he was — apparently his distin-
guished medical training had something to do with it — to be
president of a motor factory, and Mr. Babbitt confided:

"You fellows are a lot younger than I am, eight-ten years, and
you haven't learned yet, like I have, that where the big pleasure
is, is in Ideals and Service and a Public Career. Now just
between you and me and the gatepost, my vogue doesn't lie in
real estate but in oratory. Fact, one time I planned to study law
and go right in for politics. Just between ourselves, and I don't

96

want this to go any farther, I've been making some pretty good
affiliations lately — been meeting some of the rising young Re-
publican politicians. Of course a fellow has got to start in mod-
estly, but I may say, sotto voce, that I expect to run for alder-
man next fall. It's practically only a step from that to mayor and
then to governor of the state, and if I find the career suits me,
there's no reason why in ten or twelve years, say in 1918 or 1920,
I shouldn't have the honor of representing the great state of
Winnemac in Washington, D. C!"

In the presence of a Napoleon like Clif and a Gladstone like
George F. Babbitt, Martin perceived his own lack of power and
business skill, and when he had returned to Mohalis he was
restless. Of his poverty he had rarely thought, but now, in con-
trast to Clif's rich ease, his own shabby clothes and his pinched
room seemed shameful.

11

A long letter from Leora, hinting that she might not be able
to return to Zenith, left him the more lonely. Nothing seemed
worth doing. In that listless state he was mooning about the
laboratory during elementary bacteriology demonstration hour,
when Gottlieb sent him to the basement to bring up six male
rabbits for inoculation. Gottlieb was working eighteen hours a
day on new experiments; he was jumpy and testy; he gave
orders like insults. When Martin came dreamily back with six
females instead of males, Gottlieb shrieked at him, "You are the
worst fool that was ever in this lab!"

The groundlings, second-year men who were not unmindful
of Martin's own scoldings, tittered like small animals, and jarred
him into raging, "Well, I couldn't make out what you said.
And it's the first time I ever fell down. I won't stand your talk-
ing to me like that!"

"You will stand anything I say! Clumsy! You can take your
hat and get out!"

"You mean I'm fired as assistant?"

"I am glad you haf enough intelligence to understand thar,
no matter how wretchet I talk!"

Martin flung away. Gottlieb suddenly looked bewildered and
took a step toward Martin's retreating back. But the class, the
small giggling animals, they stood delighted, hoping for more,

97

and Gottlieb shrugged, glared them into terror, sent the least
awkward of them for the rabbits, and went on, curiously quiet.

And Martin, at Barney's dive, was hotly drinking the first of
the whiskys which sent him wandering all night, by himself.
With each drink he admitted that he had an excellent chance
to become a drunkard, and with each he boasted that he did
not care. Had Leora been nearer than Wheatsylvania, twelve
hundred miles away, he would have fled to her for salvation.
He was still shaky next morning, and he had already taken a
drink to make it possible to live through the morning when
he received the note from Dean Silva bidding him report to the
office at once.

The dean lectured:

"Arrowsmith, you've been discussed a good deal by the faculty
council of late. Except in one or two courses — in my own I
have no fault to find — you have been very inattentive. Your
marks have been all right, but you could do still better. Recently
you have also been drinking. You have been seen in places of
very low repute, and you have been intimate with a man who
took it upon himself to insult me, the Founder, our guests, and
the University. Various faculty members have complained of
your superior attitude — making fun of our courses right out in
class! But Dr. Gottlieb has always warmly defended you. He
insisted that you have a real flair for investigative science. Last
night, however, he admitted that you had recently been im-
pertinent to him. Now unless you immediately turn over a new
leaf, young man, I shall have to suspend you for the rest of the
year and, if that doesn't do the work, I shall have to ask for your
resignation. And I think it might be a good thing for your
humility — you seem to have the pride of the devil, young man! —
it might be a good idea for you to see Dr. Gottlieb and start off
your reformation by apologizing — "

It was the whisky spoke, not Martin:

"I'm damned if I will! He can go to the devil! I've given
him my life, and then he tattles on me — "

"That's absolutely unfair to Dr. Gottlieb. He merely — "

"Sure. He merely let me down. I'll see him in hell before I'll
apologize, after the way I've worked for him. And as for Clif
Clawson that you were hinting at — him 'take it on himself to

98

insult anybody'? He just played a joke, and you went after his
scalp. I'm glad he did it!"

Then Martin waited for the words that would end his scien-
tific life.

The little man, the rosy, pudgy, good little man, he stared
and hummed and spoke softly:

"Arrowsmith, I could fire you right now, of course, but I
believe you have good stuff in you. I decline to let you go.
Naturally, you're suspended, at least till you come to your senses
and apologize to me and to Gottlieb." He was fatherly; almost
he made Martin repent; but he concluded, "And as for Clawson,
his 'joke' regarding this Benoni Carr person — and why I never
looked the fellow up is beyond me, I suppose I was too busy —
his 'joke,' as you call it, was the action either of an idiot or a
blackguard, and until you are able to perceive that fact, I don't
think you will be ready to come back to us."

"All right," said Martin, and left the room.

He was very sorry for himself. The real tragedy, he felt, was
that though Gottlieb had betrayed him and ended his career,
ended the possibility of his mastering science and of marrying
Leora, he still worshiped the man.

He said good-by to no one in Mohalis save his landlady. He
packed, and it was a simple packing. He stuffed his books, his
notes, a shabby suit, his inadequate linen, and his one glory, the
dinner clothes, into his unwieldy imitation-leather bag. He re-
membered with drunken tears the hour of buying the dinner
jacket.

Martin's money, from his father's tiny estate, came in bi-
monthly checks from the bank at Elk Mills. He had now but
six dollars.

In Zenith he left his bag at the interurban trolley station and
sought Clif, whom he found practicing eloquence over a beauti-
ful pearl-gray motor hearse, in .which a beer-fed undertaker was
jovially interested. He waited, sitting hunched and twisted on
the steel running-board of a limousine. He resented but he was
too listless to resent greatly the stares of the other salesmen and
the girl stenographers.

Clif dashed up, bumbling, "Well, well, how's the boy? Come
out and catchum little drink."

"I could use one."

99

Martin knew that Clif was staring at him. As they entered
the bar of the Grand Hotel, with its paintings of lovely but
absent-minded ladies, its mirrors, its thick marble rail along a
mahogany bar, he blurted:

"Well, I got mine, too. Dad Silva's fired me, for general foot-
lessness. I'm going to bum around a little and then get some
kind of a job. God, but I'm tired and nervous! Say, can you lend
me some money?"

"You bet. All I've got. How much you want?"

"Guess I'll need a hundred dollars. May drift around quite
some time."

"Golly, I haven't got that much, but prob'ly I can raise it at
the office. Here, sit down at this table and wait for me."

How Clif obtained the hundred dollars has never been ex-
plained, but he was back with it in a quarter-hour. They went
on to dinner, and Martin had much too much whisky. Clif
took him to his own boarding-house — which was decidedly less
promissory of prosperity than Clif's clothes — firmly gave him a
cold bath to bring him to, and put him to bed. Next morning he
offered to find a job for him, but Martin refused and left Zenith
by the northbound train at noon.

Always, in America, there remains from pioneer days a cheer-
ful pariahdom of shabby young men who prowl causelessly
from state to state, from gang to gang, in the power of the
Wanderlust. They wear black sateen shirts, and carry bundles.
They are not permanently tramps. They have home towns to
which they return, to work quietly in the factory or the section-
gang for a year — for a week — and as quietly to disappear again.
They crowd the smoking cars at night; they sit silent on benches
in filthy stations; they know all the land yet of it they know
nothing, because in a hundred cities they see only the employ-
ment agencies, the all-night lunches, the blind-pigs, the scabrous
lodging-houses. Into that world. of voyageurs Martin vanished.
Drinking steadily, only half-conscious of whither he was going,
of what he desired to do, shamefully haunted by Leora and Clif
and the swift hands of Gottlieb, he flitted from Zenith to the
city of Sparta, across to Ohio, up into Michigan, west to Illinois.
His mind was a shambles. He could never quite remember,
afterward, where he had been. Once, it is clear, he was soda-
fountain clerk in a Minnemagantic drug-store. Once he must

IOO

have been, for a week, dishwasher in the stench of a cheap res-
taurant. He wandered by freight trains, on blind baggages, on
foot. To his fellow prospectors he was known as "Slim," the
worst-tempered and most restless of all their company.

After a time a sense of direction began to appear in his crazy
drifting. He was instinctively headed westward, and to the west,
toward the long prairie dusk, Leora was waiting. For a day or
two he stopped drinking. He woke up feeling not like the sickly
hobo called "Slim," but like Martin Arrowsmith, and he pon-
dered, with his mind running clear, "Why shouldn't I go back?
Maybe this hasn't been so bad for me. I was working too hard.
I was pretty high-strung. Blew up. Like to, uh — Wonder what
happened to my rabbits? . . . Will they ever let me do research
again r

But to return to the University before he had seen Leora was
impossible. His need of her was an obsession, making the rest
of earth absurd and worthless. He had, with blurry cunning,
saved most of the hundred dollars he had taken from Clif; he
had lived — very badly, on grease-swimming stews and soda-
reeking bread — by what he earned along the way. Suddenly, on
no particular day, in no particular town in Wisconsin, he stalked
to the station, bought a ticket to Wheatsylvania, North Dakota,
and telegraphed to Leora, "Coming 2:43 tomorrow Wednesday
Sandy."

in

He crossed the wide Mississippi into Minnesota. He changed
trains at St. Paul; he rolled into gusty vastnesses of snow, cut
by thin lines of fence-wire. He felt free, in release from the
little fields of Winnemac and Ohio, in relaxation from the
shaky nerves of midnight study and midnight booziness. He
remembered his days of wire-stringing in Montana and regained
that careless peace. Sunset was a surf of crimson, and by night,
when he stepped from the choking railroad coach and tramped
the platform at Sauk Center, he drank the icy air and looked
up to the vast and solitary winter stars. The fan of the Northern
Lights frightened and glorified the sky. He returned to the
coach with the energy of that courageous land. He nodded and
gurgled in brief smothering sleep; he sprawled on the seat and
talked with friendly fellow vagrants; he drank bitter cofTee and

101

ate enormously of buckwheat cakes at a station restaurant; and
so, changing at anonymous towns, he came at last to the squatty
shelters, the two wheat-elevators, the cattle-pen, the oil-tank,
and the red box of a station with its slushy platform, which
composed the outskirts of Wheatsylvania. Against the station,
absurd in a huge coonskin coat, stood Leora. He must have
looked a little mad as he stared at her from the vestibule, as he
shivered with the wind. She lifted to him her two open hands,
childish in red mittens. He ran down, he dropped his awkward
bag on the platform and, unaware of the gaping furry farmers,
they were lost in a kiss.

Years after, in a tropic noon, he remembered the freshness of
her wind-cooled cheeks.

The train was gone, pounding out of the tiny station. It had
stood like a dark wall beside the platform, protecting them, but
now the light from the snowfields glared in on them and left
them exposed and self-conscious.

"What — what's happened?" she fluttered. "No letters. I was so
frightened."

"Off bumming. The dean suspended me — being fresh to profs.
D' y' care?"

"Course not, if you wanted to — "

"I've come to marry you."

"I don't see how we can, dearest, but — All right. There'll
be a lovely row with Dad." She laughed. "He's always so sur-
prised and hurt when anything happens that he didn't plan out.
It'll be nice to have you with me in the scrap, because you
aren't supposed to know that he expects to plan out everything
for everybody and — Oh, Sandy, I've been so lonely for youl
Mother isn't really a bit sick, not the least bit, but they go on
keeping me here. I think probably somebody hinted to Dad
that folks were saying he must be broke, if his dear little daugh-
ter had to go off and learn nursing, and he hasn't worried it
all out yet — it takes Andrew Jackson Tozer about a year to
worry out anything. Oh, Sandy! You're here!"

After the clatter and jam of the train, the village seemed
blankly empty. He could have walked around the borders of
Wheatsylvania in ten minutes. Probably to Leora one building
differed from another — she appeared to distinguish between the
general store of Norblom and that of Frazier & Lamb — but to

102

Martin the two-story wooden shacks creeping aimlessly along
the wide Main Street were featureless and inappreciable. Then
"There's our house, end of the next block," said Leora, as they
turned the corner at the feed and implement store, and in a
panic of embarrassment Martin wanted to halt. He saw a storm
coming: Mr. Tozer denouncing him as a failure who desired
to ruin Leora, Mrs. Tozer weeping.

"Say — say — say — have you told 'em about me?" he stammered.

"Yes. Sort of. I said you were a wonder in medic school, and
maybe we'd get married when you finished your internship,
and then when your wire came, they wanted to know why you
were coming, and why it was you wired from Wisconsin, and
what color necktie you had on when you were sending the
wire, and I couldn't make 'em understand I didn't know. They
discussed it. Quite a lot. They do discuss things. All through
supper. Solemn. Oh, Sandy, do curse and swear some at meals."

He was in a funk. Her parents, formerly amusing figures in
a story, became oppressively real in sight of the wide, brown,
porchy house. A large plate-glass window with a colored border
had recently been cut through the wall, as a sign of prosperity,
and the garage was new and authoritative.

He tagged after Leora, expecting the blast. Mrs. Tozer opened
the door, and stared at him plaintively — a thin, faded, unhumor-
ous woman. She bowed as though he was not so much unwel-
come as unexplained and doubtful.

"Will you show Mr. Arrowsmith his room, Ory, or shall I?"
she peeped.

It was the kind of house that has a large phonograph but no
books, and if there were any pictures, as beyond hope there
must have been, Martin never remembered them. The bed in
his room was lumpy but covered with a chaste figured spread,
and the flowery pitcher and bowl rested on a cover embroidered
in red with lambs, frogs, water lilies, and a pious motto.

He took as long as he could in unpacking things which needed
no unpacking, and hesitated down the stairs. No one was in
the parlor, which smelled of furnace-heat and balsam pillows;
then, from nowhere apparent, Mrs. Tozer was there, worrying
about him and trying to think of something polite to say.

"Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?"

"Oh, yes, it was — Well, it was pretty crowded."

"Oh, was it crowded?"

"Yes, there were a lot of people traveling."

"Were there? I suppose — Yes. Sometimes I wonder where
all the people can be going that you see going places all the
time. Did you — was it verv cold in the Cities — in Minneapolis
and St. Paul?"

"Yes, it was pretty cold."

"Oh, was it cold?"

Mrs. Tozer was so still, so anxiously polite. He felt like a
burglar taken for a guest, and intensely he wondered where
Leora could be. She came in serenely, with coflfee and a tre-
mendous Swedish coffee-ring voluptuous with raisins and glis-
tening brown sugar, and she had them talking, almost easily,
about the coldness of winter and the value of Fords when into
the midst of all this brightness slid Mr. Andrew Jackson Tozer,
and they drooped again to politeness.

Mr. Tozer was as thin and undistinguished and sun-worn as
his wife, and like her he peered, he kept silence and fretted.
He was astonished by everything in the world that did not bear
on his grain elevator, his creamery, his tiny bank, the United
Brethren Church, and the careful conduct of an Overland car.
It was not astounding that he should have become almost rich,
for he accepted nothing that was not natural and convenient
to Andrew Jackson Tozer.

He hinted a desire to know whether Martin "drank," how
prosperous he was, and how he could possibly have come all
this way from the urbanities of Winnemac. (The Tozers were
born in Illinois, but they had been in Dakota since childhood,
and they regarded Wisconsin as the farthest, most perilous rim
of the Eastern horizon.) They were so blank, so creepily polite,
that Martin was able to avoid such unpleasant subjects as being
suspended. He dandled an impression that he was an earnest
young medic who in no time at all would be making large and
suitable sums of money for the support of their Leora, but as
he was beginning to lean back in his chair he was betrayed by
the appearance of Leora's brother.

Bert Tozer, Albert R. Tozer, cashier and vice-president of the
Wheatsylvania State Bank, auditor and vice-president of the
Tozer Grain and Storage Company, treasurer and vice-president
of the Star Creamery, was not in the least afflicted by the listen-

104

ing dubiousness of his parents. Bertie was a very articulate and
modern man of affairs. He had buck teeth, and on his eye-glasses
was a gold chain leading to a dainty hook behind his left ear.
He believed in town-boosting, organized motor tours, Boy
Scouts, baseball, and the hanging of I.W.W.'s; and his most
dolorous regret was that Wheatsylvania was too small — as yet —
to have a Y.M.C.A. or a Commercial Club. Plunging in beside
him was his fiancee, Miss Ada Quist, daughter of the feed and
implement store. Her nose was sharp, but not so sharp as her
voice or the suspiciousness with which she faced Martin.

"This Arrowsmith?" demanded Bert. "Huh! Well, guess
you're glad to be out here in God's country!"

"Yes, it's fine—"

"Trouble with the Eastern states is, they haven't got the git,
or the room to grow. You ought to see a real Dakota harvest!
Look here, how come you're away from school this time of
year?"

"Why—"

"I know all about school-terms. I went to business college in
Grand Forks. How come you can get away now?"

"I took a little lay-off."

"Leora says you and her are thinking of getting married."

"We—"

"Got any cash outside your school-money?"

"I have not!"

"Thought so! How juh expect to support a wife?"

"I suppose I'll be practicing medicine some day."

"Some day! Then what's the use of talking about being en-
gaged till you can support a wife?"

"That," interrupted Bert's lady-love, Miss Ada Quist, "that's
just what / said, Ory!" She seemed to speak with her pointed
nose as much as with her button of a mouth. "If Bert and I
can wait, I guess other people can!"

Mrs. Tozer whimpered, "Don't be too hard on Mr. Arrow-
smith, Bertie. I'm sure he wants to do the right thing."

"I'm not being hard on anybody! I'm being sensible. If Pa
and you would tend to things instead of standing around fuss-
ing, I wouldn't have to butt in. I don't believe in interfering
with anybody else's doings, or anybody interfering with mine.
Live and let live and mind your own business is my motto, and

105

that's what I said to Alec Ingleblad the other day when I was
in there having a shave and he was trying to get funny about
our holding so many mortgages, but I'll be blamed if I'm going
to allow a fellow that I don't know anything about to come
snooping around My Sister till I find out something about his
prospects!"

Leora crooned, "Bertie, lamb, your tie is climbing your collar
again."

"Yes and you, Ory," shrieked Bert, "if it wasn't for me you'd
have married Sam Petchek, two years ago!"

Bert further said, with instances and illustrations, that she was
light-minded, and as for nursing — Nursing!

She said that Bert was what he was, and tried to explain to
Martin the matter of Sam Petchek. (It has never yet been alto-
gether explained.)

Ada Quist said that Leora did not care if she broke her dear
parents' hearts and ruined Bert's career.

Martin said, "Look here, I — " and never got farther.

Mr. and Mrs. Tozer said they were all to be calm, and of
course Bert didn't mean — But really, it was true; they had to
be sensible, and how Mr. Arrowsmith could expect to support
a wife —

The conference lasted till nine-thirty, which, as Mr. Tozer
pointed out, was everybody's bedtime, and except for the five-
minute discussion as to whether Miss Ada Quist was to stay to
supper, and the debate on the saltiness of this last cornbeef, they
clave faithfully to the inquiry as to whether Martin and Leora
were engaged. All persons interested, which apparently did not
include Martin and Leora, decided that they were not. Bert
ushered Martin upstairs. He saw to it that the lovers should
not have a chance for a good-night kiss; and until Mr. Tozer
called down the hall, at seven minutes after ten, "You going
to stay up and chew the rag the whole blessed night, Bert?"
he made himself agreeable by sitting on Martin's bed, looking
derisively at his shabby baggage, and demanding the details of
his parentage, religion, politics, and attitude toward the horrors
of card-playing and dancing.

At breakfast they all hoped that Martin would stay one more
night in their home — plenty of room.

1 06

Bert stated that Martin would come down-town at ten and be
shown the bank, creamery, and wheat elevator.

But at ten Martin and Leora were on the eastbound train.
They got out at the county seat, Leopolis, a vast city of four
thousand population, with a three-story building. At one that
afternoon they were married, by the German Lutheran pastor.
His study was a bareness surrounding a large, rusty wood-stove,
and the witnesses, the pastor's wife and an old German who had
been shoveling walks, sat on the wood-box and looked drowsy.
Not till they had caught the afternoon train for Wheatsylvania
did Martin and Leora escape from the ghostly apprehension
which had hunted them all day. In the fetid train, huddled close,
hands locked, innocently free of the alienation' which the pom-
posity of weddings sometimes casts between lovers, they sighed,
"Now what are we going to do — what are we going to do?"

At the Wheatsylvania station they were met by the whole
family, rampant.

Bert had suspected elopement. He had searched half a dozen
towns by long-distance telephone, and got through to the county
clerk just after the license had been granted. It did not soften
Bert's mood to have the clerk remark that if Martin and Leora
were of age, there was nothing he could do, and he didn't "care
a damn who's talking — I'm running this office!"

Bert had come to the station determined to make Martin per-
fect, even as Bert Tozer was perfect, and to do it right now.

It was a dreadful evening in the Tozer mansion.

Mr. Tozer said, with length, that Martin had undertaken re-
sponsibilities.

Mrs. Tozer wept, and said that she hoped Ory had not, for
certain reasons, had to be married —

Bert said that if such was the case, he'd kill Martin —

Ada Quist said that Ory could now see what came of pride
and boasting about going oflf to her old Zenith —

Mr. Tozer said that there was one good thing about it, any-
way: Ory could see for herself that they couldn't let her go back
to nursing school and get into more difficulties —

Martin from time to time offered remarks to the effect that he
was a good young man, a wonderful bacteriologist, and able to
take care of his wife; but no one save Leora listened.

Bert further propounded (while his father squeaked, "Now

107

don't be too hard on the boy,") that if Martin thought for one
single second that he was going to get one red cent out of the
Tozers because he'd gone and butted in where nobody 'd invited
him, he, Bert, wanted to know about it, that was all, he certainly
wanted to \now about it!

And Leora watched them, turning her little head from one
to another. Once she came over to press Martin's hand. In the
roughest of the storm, when Martin was beginning to glare, she
drew from a mysterious pocket a box of very bad cigarettes, and
lighted one. None of the Tozers had discovered that she smoked.
Whatever they thought about her sex morals, her infidelity to
United Brethrenism, and her general dementia, they had not
suspected that she could commit such an obscenity as smoking.
They charged on her, and Martin caught his breath savagely.

During these fulminations Mr. Tozer had somehow made up
his mind. He could at times take the lead away from Bert,
whom he considered useful but slightly indiscreet, and unable
to grasp the "full value of a dollar." (Mr. Tozer valued it at
one dollar and ninety, but the progressive Bert at scarce more
than one-fifty.) Mr. Tozer mildly gave orders:

They were to stop "scrapping." They had no proof that Martin
was necessarily a bad match for Ory. They would see. Martin
would return to medical school at once, and be a good boy and
get through as quickly as he could and begin to earn money.
Ory would remain at home and behave herself — and she cer-
tainly would never act like a Bad Woman again, and smoke
cigarettes. Meantime Martin and she would have no, uh, rela-
tions. (Mrs. Tozer looked embarrassed, and the hungrily atten-
tive Ada Quist tried to blush.) They could write to each other
once a week, but that was all. They would in no way, uh, act
as though they were married till he gave permission.

"Well?" he demanded.

Doubtless Martin should have defied them and with his bride
in his arms have gone forth into the night. But it seemed only
a moment to graduation, to beginning his practice. He had
Leora now, forever. For her, he must be sensible. He would
return to work, and be Practical. Gottlieb's ideals of science?
Laboratories? Research? Rot!

"All right," he said.

It did not occur to him that their abstention from love began

108

tonight; it did not come to him till, holding out his hands to
Leora, smiling with virtue at having determined to be prudent,
he heard Mr. Tozer cackling, "Ory, you go on up to bed now —
in your own room!"

That was his bridal night; tossing in his bed, ten yards from
her.

Once he heard a door open, and thrilled to her coming. He
waited, taut. She did not come. He peeped out, determined to
find her room. His deep feeling about his brother-in-law sud-
denly increased. Bert was parading the hall, on guard. Had Bert
been more formidable, Martin might have killed him, but he
could not face that buck-toothed and nickering righteousness.
He lay and resolved to curse them all in the morning and go
of! with Leora, but with the coming of the three-o'clock depres-
sion he perceived that with him she would probably starve, that
he was disgraced, that it was not at all certain he would not
become a drunkard.

"Poor kid, I'm not going to spoil her life. God, I do love her!
I'm going back, and the way I'm going to work — Can I stand
this?"

That was his bridal night and the barren dawn.

Three days later he was walking into the office of Dr. Silva.
dean of the Winnemac Medical School.

109

CHAPTER X

DEAN SILVA'S secretary looked up delightedly, she
hearkened with anticipation. But Martin said meekly,
"Please, could I see the dean?" and meekly he waited,
in the row of oak chairs beneath the Dawson Hunziker phar-
maceutical calendar.

When he had gone solemnly through the ground-glass door
to the dean's office, he found Dr. Silva glowering. Seated, the
little man seemed large, so domed was his head, so full his
rounding mustache.

"Well, sir!"

Martin pleaded, "I'd like to come back, if you'll let me. Hon-
est, I do apologize to you, and I'll go to Dr. Gottlieb and apolo-
gize— though honest, I can't lay down on Clif Clawson — "

Dr. Silva bounced up from his chair, bristling. Martin braced
himself. Wasn't he welcome? Had he no home, anywhere? He
could not fight. He had no more courage. He was so tired after
the drab journey, after restraining himself from flaring out at
the Tozers. He was so tired! He looked wistfully at the dean.

The little man chuckled, "Never mind, boy. It's all right!
We're glad you're back. Bother the apologies! I just wanted you
to do whatever'd buck you up. It's good to have*you back! I
believed in you, and then I thought perhaps we'd lost you.
Clumsy old man!"

Martin was sobbing, too weak for restraint, too lonely and
too weak, and Dr. Silva soothed, "Let's just go over everything
and find out where the trouble was. What can I do? Under-
stand, Martin, the thing I want most in life is to help give the
world as many good physicians, great healers, as I can. What
started your nervousness? Where have you been?"

When Martin came to Leora and his marriage, Silva purred,

no

'Tm delighted! She sounds like a splendid girl. Well, we must
try and get you into Zenith General for your internship, a year
from now, and make you able to support her properly."

Martin remembered how often, how astringently, Gottlieb had
sneered at "dese merry vedding or jail bells." He went away
Silva's disciple; he went away to study furiously; and the bril-
liant insanity of Max Gottlieb's genius vanished from his faith.

n

Leora wrote that she had been dropped from the school of
nursing for over-absence and for being married. She suspected
that it was her father who had informed the hospital authori-
ties. Then, it appeared, she had secretly sent for a shorthand
book and, on pretense of helping Bert, she was using the type-
writer in the bank, hoping that by next autumn she could join
Martin and earn her own living as a stenographer.

Once he offered to give up medicine, to take what work he
could find and send for her. She refused.

Though in his service to Leora and to the new god, Dean
Silva, he had become austere, denying himself whisky, learning
page on page of medicine with a frozen fury, he was always
in a vacuum of desire for her, and always he ran the last block
to his boarding-house, looking for a letter from her. Suddenly
he had a plan. He had tasted shame — this one last shame would
not matter. He would flee to her in Easter vacation; he would
compel Tozer to support her while she studied stenography in
Zenith; he would have her near him through the last year. He
paid Clif the borrowed hundred, when the bi-monthly check
came from Elk Mills, and calculated his finances to the penny.
By not buying the suit he distressingly needed, he could manage
it. Then for a month and more he had but two meals a day,
and of those meals one was bread and butter and coffee. He
washed his own linen in the bath-tub and, except for occasional
fiercely delightful yieldings, he did not smoke.

His return to Wheatsylvania was like his first flight, except
that he talked less with fellow tramps, and all the way, between
uneasy naps in the red-plush seats of coaches, he studied the
bulky books of gynecology and internal medicine. He had writ-
ten certain instructions to Leora. He met her on the edge of

III

Wheatsylvania and they had a moment's talk, a resolute kiss.

News spreads not slowly in Wheatsylvania. There is a cer-
tain interest in other people's affairs, and the eyes of citizens of
whose existence Martin did not know had followed him from
his arrival. When the culprits reached the bone-littered castle
of the Tozer ogres, Leora's father and brother were already
there, and raging. Old Andrew Jackson cried out upon them.
He said that conceivably it may not have been insane in Martin
to have "run away from school once, but to go and sneak back
this second time was "absolutely plumb crazy." Through his
tirade, Martin and Leora smiled confidently.

From Bert, "By God, sir, this is too much!" Bert had been
reading fiction. "I object to the use of profanity, but when you
come and annoy My Sister a second time, all I can say is, by
God, sir, this is too blame much!"

Martin looked meditatively out of the window. He noticed
three people strolling the muddy street. They all viewed the
Tozer house with hopeful interest. Then he spoke steadily:

"Mr. Tozer, I've been working hard. Everything has gone
fine. But I've decided I don't care to live without my wife. I've
come to take her back. Legally, you can't prevent me. I'll admit,
without any argument, I can't support her yet, if I stay in the
University. She's going to study stenography. She'll be support-
ing herself in a few months, and meanwhile I expect you to be
decent enough to send her money."

"This is too much," said Tozer, and Bert carried it on: "Fel-
low not only practically ruins a girl but conies and demands
that we support her for him!"

"All right. Just as you want. In the long run it'll be better
for her and for me and for you if I finish medic school and
have my profession, but if you won't take care of her, I'll chuck
school, I'll go to work. Oh, I'll support her, all right! Only you'll
never see her again. If you go on being idiots, she and I will
leave here on the night train for the Coast, and that'll be the
end." For the first time in his centuries of debate with the
Tozers, he was melodramatic. He shook his fist under Bert's
nose. "And if you try to prevent our going, God help you! And
the way this town will laugh at you! . . . How about it, Leora?
Are you ready to go away with me — forever?"

"Yes," she said.

112

They discussed it, greatly. Tozer and Bert struck attitudes of
defense. They couldn't, they said, be bullied by anybody. Also,
Martin was an Adventurer, and how did Leora know he wasn't
planning to live on the money they sent her? In the end they
crawled. They decided that this new, mature Martin, this new,
hard-eyed Leora were ready to throw away everything for each
other.

Mr. Tozer whined a good deal, and promised to send her
seventy dollars a month till she should be prepared for office-
work.

At the Wheatsylvania station, looking from the train win-
dow, Martin realized that this anxious-eyed, lip-puckering An-
drew Jackson Tozer did love his daughter, did mourn her going.

in

He found for Leora a room on the frayed northern edge of
Zenith, miles nearer Mohalis and the University than her hos-
pital had been; a square white and blue room, with blotchy but
shoulder-wise chairs. It looked out on breezy, stubbly waste land
reaching to distant glittering railroad tracks. The landlady was
a round German woman with an eye for romance. It is doubtful
if she ever believed that they were married. She was a good
woman.

Leora's trunk had come. Her stenography books were primly
set out on her little table and her pink felt slippers were ar-
ranged beneath the white iron bed. Martin stood with her at
the window, mad with the pride of proprietorship. Suddenly
he was so weak, so tired, that the mysterious cement which holds
cell to cell seemed dissolved, and he felt that he was collapsing.
But with knees rigidly straightening, his head back, his lips
tight across his teeth, he caught himself, and cried, "Our first
home!"

That he should be with her, quiet, none disturbing, was in-
toxication.

The commonplace room shone with peculiar light; the vig-
orous weeds and rough grass of the waste land were radiant
under the April sun, and sparrows were cheeping.

"Yes," said Leora, with voice, then hungry lips.

113

IV

Leora attended the Zenith University of Business Administra-
tion and Finance, which title indicated that it was a large and
quite reasonably bad school for stenographers, bookkeepers, and
such sons of Zenith brewers and politicians as were unable to
enter even state universities. She trotted daily to the car-line, a
neat, childish figure with note-books and sharpened pencils, to
vanish in the horde of students. It was six months before she
had learned enough stenography to obtain a place in an insur-
ance office.

Till Martin graduated they kept that room, their home, ever
dearer. No one was so domestic as these birds of passage. At
least two evenings a week Martin dashed in from Mohalis and
studied there. She had a genius for keeping out of his way, for
not demanding to be noticed, so that, while he plunged into
his books as he never had done in Clif's rustling, grunting, ex-
pectorating company, he had ever the warm, half-conscious feel-
ing of her presence. Sometimes, at midnight, just as he began
to realize that he was hungry, he would find that a plate of
sandwiches had by silent magic appeared at his elbow. He was
none the less affectionate because he did not comment. She
made him secure. She shut out the world that had pounded at
him.

On their walks, at dinner, in the dissolute and deliciously
wasteful quarter-hour when they sat on the edge of the bed
with comforters wrapped about them and smoked an inexcusa-
ble cigarette before breakfast, he explained his work to her, and
when her own studying was done, she tried to read whichever
of his books was not in use. Knowing nothing, never learning
much, of the actual details of medicine, yet she understood —
better it may be than Angus Duer — his philosophy and the basis
of his work. If he had given up Gottlieb-worship and his yearn-
ing for the laboratory as for a sanctuary, if he had resolved to
be a practical and wealth-mastering doctor, yet something of
Gottlieb's spirit remained. He wanted to look behind details and
impressive-sounding lists of technical terms for the causes of
things, for general rules which might reduce the chaos of dis-
similar and contradictory symptoms to the orderliness of chem-
istry.

114

Saturday evening they went solemnly to the motion pictures —
one- and two-reel films with Cowboy Billy Anderson and a girl
later to be famous as Mary Pickford — and solemnly they dis-
cussed the non-existent plots as they returned, unconscious of
other people on the streets; but when they walked into the
country on a Sunday (with four sandwiches and a bottle of
ginger ale in his threadbare pockets), he chased her up-hill and
down-gully, and they lost their solemnity in joyous childishness.
He intended, when he came to her room in the evening, to catch
the owl-car to Mohalis and be near his work when he woke in
the morning. He was resolute about it, always, and she admired
his efficiency, but he never caught the car. The crew of the six
o'clock morning interurban became used to a pale, quick-moving
young man who sat hunched in a back seat, devouring large red
books, absently gnawing a rather dreadful doughnut. But in
this young man there was none of the heaviness of workers
dragged out of bed at dawn for another gray and futile day of
labor. He appeared curiously determined, curiously content.

It was all so much easier, now that he was partly freed from
the tyrannical honesty of Gottliebism, from the unswerving
quest for causes which, as it drove through layer below layer,
seemed ever farther from the bottommost principles, from the
intolerable strain of learning day by day how much he did not
know. It warmed him to escape from Gottlieb's ice-box into
Dean Silva's neighborly world.

Now and then he saw Gottlieb on the campus. They bowed
in embarrassment and passed in haste.

There seemed to be no division between his Junior and Senior
years. Because of the time he had lost, he had to remain in
Mohalis all summer. The year and a naif from his marriage to
his graduation was one whirling bewilderment, without seasons
or dates.

When he had, as they put it, "cut out his nonsense and
buckled down to work," he had won the admiration of Dr.
Silva and all the Good Students, especially Angus Duer and
the Reverend Ira Hinkley. Martin had always announced that
he did not care for their approbation, for the applause of com-

115

monplace drudges, but now that he had it, he prized it. How-
ever much he scofied, he was gratified when he was treated as
a peer by Angus, who spent the summer as extern in the Zenith
General Hospital, and who already had the unapproachable dig-
nity of a successful young surgeon.

Through that hot summer Martin and Leora labored, pant-
ing, and when they sat in her room, over their books and a
stout pot of beer, neither their costumes nor their language had
the decorum which one ought to expect from a romantic pair
devoted to science and high endeavor. They were not very
modest. Leora came to use, in her casual way, such words, such
ancient Anglo-Saxon monosyllables, as would have dismayed
Angus or Bert Tozer. On their evenings off they went economi-
cally to an imitation Coney Island beside a scummy and stink-
ing lake, and with grave pleasure they ate Hot Dogs, painstak-
ingly they rode the scenic railway.

Their chief appetizer was Clif Clawson. Clif was never will-
ingly alone or silent except when he was asleep. It is probable
that his success in motor-salesmanship came entirely from his
fondness for the enormous amounts of bright conversation which
seem necessary in that occupation. How much of his attention
to Martin and Leora was friendliness and how much of it was
due to his fear of being alone cannot be determined, but cer-
tainly he entertained them and drew them out of themselves,
and never seemed offended by the surly unwillingness with
which Martin was sometimes guilty of greeting him.

He would come roaring up to the house in a motor, the
muffler always cut out. He would shout at their window, "Come
on, you guys! Come out of it! Shake a leg! Lez have a little
drive and get cooled off, and then I'll buy you a feed."

That Martin had to work, Clif never comprehended. There
was small excuse for Martin's occasional brutality in showing his
annoyance but, now that he was fulfilled in Leora and quite
thoroughly and selfishly careless as to what hungry need others
might have of himself, now that he was in a rut of industry and
satisfied companionship, he was bored by Clif's unchanging
flood of heavy humor. It was Leora who was courteous. She had
heard rather too often the seven jokes which, under varying
guises, made up all of Clif's humor and philosophy, but she
could sit for hours looking amiable while Clif told how clever

116

/
he was at selling, and she sturdily reminded Martin that they
would never have a friend more loyal or generous.

But Clif went to New York, to a new motor agency, and
Martin and Leora were more completely and happily dependent
on each other than ever before.

Their last agitation was removed by the complacence of Mr.
Tozer. He was cordial now in all his letters, however much he
irritated them by the parental advice with which he penalized
them for every check he sent.

VI

None of the hectic activities of Senior year — neurology and
pediatrics, practical work in obstetrics, taking of case-histories in
the hospitals, attendance on operations, dressing wounds, learn-
ing not to look embarrassed when charity patients called one
"Doctor" — was quite so important as the discussion of "What
shall we do after graduation?"

Is it necessary to be an intern for more than a year ? Shall we
remain general practitioners all our lives, or work toward be-
coming specialists? Which specialties are the best — that is, the
best paid? Shall we settle in the country or in the city? How
about going West? What about the army medical corps; salutes,
riding-boots, pretty women, travel?

This discussion they harried in the corridors of Main Medical,
at the hospital, at lunch-rooms; and when Martin came home
to Leora he went- through it all again, very learnedly, very ex-
planatorily. Almost every evening he "reached a decision" ^hich
was undecided again by morning.

Once when Dr. Loizeau, professor of surgery, had operated
before a clinic which included several renowned visiting doc-
tors— the small white figure of the surgeon below them, slash-
ing between life and death, dramatic as a great actor taking his
curtain-call — Martin came away certain that he was for surgery.
He agreed then with Angus Duer, who had just won the Hugh
Loizeau Medal in Experimental Surgery, that the operator was
the lion, the eagle, the soldier among doctors. Angus was one
of the few who knew without wavering precisely what he was
going to do: after his internship he was to join the celebrated
Chicago clinic headed by Dr. Rouncefield, the eminent abdomi-

117

nal surgeon. He would, he said briefly, be making twenty thou-
sand a year as a surgeon within five years.

Martin explained it all to Leora. Surgery. Drama. Fearless
nerves. Adoring assistants. Save lives. Science in devising new
techniques. Make money — not be commercial, of course, but pro-
vide Leora with comforts. To Europe — they two together — gray
London. Viennese cafes. Leora was useful to him during his
oration. She blandly agreed; and the next evening, when he
sought to prove that surgery was all rot and most surgeons
merely good carpenters, she agreed more amiably than ever.

Next to Angus, and the future medical missionary, Ira Hink-
ley, Fatty Pfaff was the first to discover what his future was.
He was going to be an obstetrician — or, as the medical students
called it technically, a "baby-snatcher." Fatty had the soul of a
midwife; he sympathized with women in their gasping agony,
sympathized honestly and almost tearfully, and he was magnifi-
cent at sitting still and drinking tea and waiting. During his
first obstetrical case, when the student with him was merely
nervous as they fidgeted by the bed in the hard desolation of
the hospital room, Fatty was terrified, and he longed as he had
never longed for anything in his flabby yet wistful life to com-
fort this gray-faced, straining, unknown woman, to take her
pains on himself.

While the others drifted, often by chance, often through rela-
tives, into their various classes, Martin remained doubtful. He
admired Dean Silva's insistence on the physician's immediate
service to mankind, but he could not forget the cool ascetic
hours in the laboratory. Toward the t id of Senior year, decision
became necessary, and he was moved by a speech in which Dean
Silva condemned too much specialization and pictured the fine
old country doctor, priest and father of his people, sane under
open skies, serene in self-conquest. On top of this came urgent
letters from Mr. Tozer, begging Martin to settle in Wheatsyl-
vania.

Tozer loved his daughter, apparently, and more or less liked
Martin, and he wanted them near him. Wheatsylvania was a
"good location," he said: solid Scandinavian and Dutch and
German and Bohemian farmers who paid their bills. The near-
est doctor was Hesselink, at Groningen, nine and a half miles
away, and Hesselink had more than he could do. If they would

118

come, he would help Martin buy his equipment: he would even
send him a check now and then during his two-year hospital
internship. Martin's capital was practically gone. Angus Duer
and he had received appointments to Zenith General Hospital,
where he would have an incomparable training, but Zenith Gen-
eral gave its interns, for the first year, nothing but board and
room, and he had feared that he could not take the appoint-
ment. Tozer's offer excited him. All night Leora and he sat up
working themselves into enthusiasm about the freedom of the
West, about the kind hearts and friendly hands of the pioneers,
about the heroism and usefulness of country doctors, and this
time they reached a decision which remained decided.

They would settle in Wheatsylvania.

If he ached a little for research and Gottlieb's divine curiosity
— well, he would be such a country doctor as Robert Koch! He
would not degenerate into a bridge-playing, duck-hunting drone.
He would have a small laboratory of his own. So he came to
the end of the year and graduated, looking rather flustered in
his cap and gown. Angus stood first and Martin seventh in the
class. He said good-by, with lamentations and considerable beer;
he found a room for Leora nearer to the hospital; and he
emerged as Martin L. Arrowsmith, M.D., house physician in
lhe Zenith General Hospital.

119

CHAPTER XI

THE Boardman Box Factory was afire. All South Zenith
was agitated by the glare on the low-hung clouds, the
smell of scorched timber, the infernal bells of charging
fire-apparatus. Miles of small wooden houses west of the factory
were threatened, and shawled women, tousled men in trousers
over nightshirts, tumbled out of bed and came running with a
thick mutter of footsteps in the night-chilled streets.

With professional calmness, firemen in helmets were stoking
the dripping engines. Policemen tramped in front of the press
of people, swinging their clubs, shouting, "Get back there, you!"
The fire-line was sacred. Only the factory-owner and the re-
porters were admitted. A crazy-eyed factory-hand was stopped
by a police sergeant.

"My tools are in there!" he shrieked.

"That don't make no never-minds," bawled the strutting ser-
geant. "Nobody can't get through here!"

But one got through. They heard the blang-blang-blang of a
racing ambulance, incessant, furious, defiant. Without orders,
the crowd opened, and through them, almost grazing them, slid
the huge gray car. At the back, haughty in white uniform, non-
chalant on a narrow seat, was The Doctor — Martin Arrowsmith.

The crowd admired him, the policemen sprang to receive him.

"Where's the fireman got hurt?" he snapped.

"Over in that shed," cried the police sergeant, running beside
the ambulance.

"Drive over closer. Nev' mind the smoke!" Martin barked at
the driver.

A lieutenant of firemen led him to a pile of sawdust on which
was huddled an unconscious youngster, his face bloodless and
clammy.

12(7

"He got a bad dose of smoke from the green lumber and
keeled over. Fine kid. Is he a goner?" the lieutenant begged.

Martin knelt by the man, felt his pulse, listened to his breath-
ing. Brusquely opening a black bag, he gave him a hypodermic
of strychnin and held a vial of ammonia to his nose. "He'll come
around. Here, you two, getum into the ambulance — hustle!"

The police sergeant and the newest probationer patrolman
sprang together, and together they mumbled, "All right, Doc."

To Martin came the chief reporter of the Advocate-Times.
In years he was only twenty-nine, but he was the oldest and
perhaps the most cynical man in the world. He had interviewed
senators; he had discovered graft in charity societies and even
in prize-fights. There were fine wrinkles beside his eyes, he
rolled Bull Durham cigarettes constantly, and his opinion of
man's honor and woman's virtue was but low. Yet to Martin,
or at least to The Doctor, he was polite.

"Will he pull through, Doc?" he twanged.

"Sure, I think so. Suffocation. Heart's still going."

Martin yelped the last words from the step at the back of the
ambulance as it went bumping and rocking through the factory
yard, through the bitter smoke, toward the shrinking :rowd.
He owned and commanded the city, he and the driver. They
ignored traffic regulations, they disdained the people, returning
from theaters and movies, who dotted the streets which un-
rolled before the flying gray hood. Let 'em get out of the way!
The traffic officer at Chickasaw and Twentieth heard them com-
ing, speeding like the Midnight Express — urrrrrr — blang-blang-
blang-blang — and cleared the noisy corner. People were jammed
against the curb, threatened by rearing horses and backing
motors, and past them hurled the ambulance, blang-blang-blang-
blang, with The Doctor holding a strap and swinging easily
on his perilous seat.

At the hospital the hall-man cried, "Shooting case in the
Arbor, Doc."

"All right. Wait'll I sneak in a drink," said Martin placidly.

On the way to his room he passed the open door of the hos-
pital laboratory, with its hacked bench, its lifeless rows of flasks
and test-tubes.

"Huh! That stuff! Poking 'round labs! This is real sure-

121

enough life," he exulted, and he did not permit himself to see
the vision of Max Gottlieb waiting there, so gaunt, so tired, so
patient.

ii

The six interns in Zenith General, including Martin and
Angus Duer, lived in a long dark room with six camp beds, and
six bureaus fantastic with photographs and ties and undarned
socks. They spent hours sitting on their beds, arguing surgery
versus internal medicine, planning the dinners which they hoped
to enjoy on their nights off, and explaining to Martin, as the
only married man, the virtues of the various nurses with whom,
one by one, they fell in love.

Martin found the hospital routine slightly dull. Though he
developed the Intern's Walk, that quick corridor step with the
stethoscope conspicuous in the pocket, he did not, he could not,
develop the bedside manner. He was sorry for the bruised, yel-
lowed, suffering patients, always changing as to individuals and
never changing as a mass of drab pain, but when he had thrice
dressed a wound, he had had enough; he wanted to go on to
new experiences. Yet the ambulance work outside the hospital
was endlessly stimulating to his pride.

The Doctor, and The Doctor alone, was safe by night in the
slum called "the Arbor." His black bag was a pass. Policemen
saluted him, prostitutes bowed to him without mockery, saloon-
keepers called out, "Evenin', Doc," and hold-up men stood back
in doorways to let him pass. Martin had power, the first obvious
power in his life. And he was led into incessant adventure.

He took a bank-president out of a dive; he helped the family
conceal the disgrace; he irritably refused their bribe; and after-
ward, when he thought of how he might have dined with Leora,
he was sorry he had refused it. He broke into hotel-rooms reek-
ing with gas and revived would-be suicides. He drank Trinidad
rum with a Congressman who advocated prohibition. He at-
tended a policeman assaulted by strikers, and a striker assaulted
by policemen. He assisted at an emergency abdominal operation
at three o'clock in the morning. The operating-room — white tile
walls and white tile floor and glittering frosted-glass skylight —
seemed lined with fire-lit ice, and the large incandescents glared
on the glass instrument cases, the cruel little knives. The sur-

122

geon, in long white gown, white turban, and pale orange rubber
gloves, made his swift incision in the square of yellowish flesh
exposed between towels, cutting deep into layers of fat, and
Martin looked on unmoved as the first blood menacingly fol-
lowed the cut. And a month after, during the Chaloosa River
flood, he worked for seventy-six hours, with half-hours of sleep
in the ambulance or on a police-station table.

He landed from a boat at what had been the second story of
a tenement and delivered a baby on the top floor; he bound up
heads and arms for a line of men; but what gave him glory was
the perfectly foolhardy feat of swimming the flood to save five
children marooned and terrified on a bobbing church pew. The
newspapers gave him large headlines, and when he had returned
to kiss Leora and sleep twelve hours, he lay and thought about
research with salty self-defensive scorn.

"Gottlieb, the poor old impractical fusser! I'd like to see him
swim that current!" jeered Dr. Arrowsmith to Martin.

But on night duty, alone, he had to face the self he had been
afraid to uncover, and he was homesick for the laboratory, for
the thrill of uncharted discoveries, the quest below the surface
and beyond the moment, the search for fundamental laws which
the scientist (however blasphemously and colloquially he may
describe it) exalts above temporary healing as the religious ex-
alts the nature and terrible glory of God above pleasant daily
virtues. With this sadness there was envy that he should be left
out of things, that others should go ahead of him, ever surer in
technique, more widely aware of the phenomena of biological
chemistry, more deeply daring to explain laws at which the
pioneers had but fumbled and hinted.

In his second year of internship, when the thrills of fires and
floods and murder became as obvious a routine as bookkeeping,
when he had seen the strangely few ways in which mankind
can contrive to injure themselves and slaughter one another,
when it was merely wearing to have to live up to the preten-
tiousness of being The Doctor, Martin tried to satisfy and per-
haps kill his guilty scientific lust by voluntary scrabbling about
the hospital laboratory, correlating the blood counts in pernicious
anemia. His trifling with the drug of research was risky. Amid
the bustle of operations he began to picture the rapt quietude
of the laboratory. "I better cut this out," he said to Leora, "if

123

I'm going to settle down in Wheatsylvania and 'tend to business
and make a living— and I by golly am!"

Dean Silva often came to the hospital on consultations. He
passed through the lobby one evening when Leora, returned
from the office where she was a stenographer, was meeting
Martin for dinner. Martin introduced them, and the little man
held her hand, purred at her, and squeaked, "Will you children
give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner? My wife has
deserted me. I am a lone and misanthropic man."

He trotted between them, round and happy. Martin and he
were not student and teacher, but two doctors together, for Dean
Silva was one pedagogue who could still be interested in a man
who no longer sat at his feet. He led the two starvelings to a
chop-house and in a settle-walled booth he craftily stuffed them
with roast goose and mugs of ale.

He concentrated on Leora, but his talk was of Martin :

"Your husband must be an Artist Healer, not a picker of trifles
like these laboratory men."

"But Gottlieb's no picker of trifles," insisted Martin.

"No-o. But with him — It's a difference of one's gods. Gott-
lieb's gods are the cynics, the destroyers — crapehangers, the vul-
gar call 'em: Diderot and Voltaire and Elser; great men, won-
der-workers, yet men that had more fun destroying other peo-
ple's theories than creating their own. But my gods now, they're
the men who took the discoveries of Gottlieb's gods and turned
them to the use of human beings — made them come alive!

"All credit to the men who invented paint and canvas, but
there's more credit, eh? to the Raphaels and Holbeins who used
those discoveries! Laennec and Osier, those are the men! It's all
very fine, this business of pure research: seeking the truth, un-
hampered by commercialism or fame-chasing. Getting to the
bottom. Ignoring consequences and practical uses. But do you
realize if you carry that idea far enough, a man could justify
himself for doing nothing but count the cobblestones on Ware-
house Avenue — yes, and justify himself for torturing people just
to see how they screamed — and then sneer at a man who was
making millions of people well and happy!

"No, no! Mrs. Arrowsmith, this lad Martin is a passionate
fellow, not a drudge. He must be passionate on behalf of man
kind. He's chosen the highest calling in the world, but he's J»

124

feckless, experimental devil. You must keep him at it, my dear,
and not let the world lose the benefit of his passion."

After this solemnity Dad Silva took them to a musical comedy
and sat between them, patting Martin's shoulder, patting Leora's
arm, choking with delight when the comedian stepped into the
pail of whitewash. In midnight volubility Martin and Leora
sputtered their affection for him, and saw their Wheatsylvania
venture as glory and salvation.

But a few days before the end of Martin's internship and their
migration to North Dakota, they met Max Gottlieb on the
street.

Martin had not seen him for more than a year; Leora never.
He looked worried and ill. While Martin was agonizing as to
whether to pass with a bow, Gottlieb stopped.

"How is everything, Martin?" he said cordially. But his eyes
said, "Why have you never come back to me?"

The boy stammered something, nothing, and when Gottlieb
had gone by, stooped and moving as in pain, he longed to run
after him.

Leora was demanding, "Is thai the Professor Gottlieb you're
always talking about?"

"Yes. Say! How does he strike you?"

"I don't — Sandy, he's the greatest man I've ever seen! I don't
know how I know, but he is! Dr. Silva is a darling, but that
was a great man! I wish — I wish we were going to see him
again. There's the first man I ever laid eyes on that I'd leave
you for, if he wanted me. He's so — oh, he's like a sword — no,
he's like a brain walking. Oh, Sandy, he looked so wretched.
I wanted to cry. I'd black his shoes!"

"God! So would I!"

But in the bustle of leaving Zenith, the excitement of the
journey to Wheatsylvania, the scramble of his state examina-
tions, the dignity of being a Practicing Physician, he forgot
Gottlieb, and on that Dakota prairie radiant in early June, with
meadow larks on every fence post, he began his work.

125

CHAPTER XII

AT the moment when Martin met him on the street, Gott

>-\ lieb was ruined.
JL JL. Max Gottlieb was a German Jew, born in Saxony in
1850. Though he took his medical degree, at Heidelberg, he was
never interested in practicing medicine. He was a follower of
Helmholtz, and youthful researches in the physics of sound con-
vinced him of the need of the quantitative method in the
medical sciences. Then Koch's discoveries drew him into biology.
Always an elaborately careful worker, a maker of long rows of
figures, always realizing the presence of uncontrollable variables,
always a vicious assailant of what he considered slackness or
lie or pomposity, never too kindly to well-intentioned stupidity,
he worked in the laboratories of Koch, of Pasteur, he followed
the early statements of Pearson in biometrics, he drank beer and
wrote vitriolic letters, he voyaged to Italy and England and
Scandinavia, and casually, between two days, he married (as he
might have bought a coat or hired a housekeeper) the patient
and wordless daughter of a Gentile merchant.

Then began a series of experiments, very important, very un-
dramatic-sounding, very long, and exceedingly unappreciated.
Back in 1881 he was confirming Pasteur's results in chicken
cholera immunity and, for relief and pastime, trying to separate
an enzyme from yeast. A few years later, living on the tiny
inheritance from his father, a petty banker, and quite carelessly
and cheerfully exhausting it, he was analyzing critically the
ptomain theory of disease, and investigating the mechanism of
the attenuation of virulence of microorganisms. He got thereby
small fame. Perhaps he was over-cautious, and more than the
devil or starvation he hated men who rushed into publication
unprepared.

126

Though he meddled little in politics, considering them the
most repetitious and least scientific of human activities, he was
a sufficiently patriotic German to hate the Junkers. As a young-
ster he had a fight or two with ruffling subalterns; once he spent
a week in jail; often he was infuriated by discriminations against
Jews : and at forty he went sadly of? to the America which could
never become militaristic or anti-Semitic — to the Hoagland Lab-
oratory in Brooklyn, then to Queen City University as professor
of bacteriology.

Here he made his first investigation of toxin-anti-toxin reac-
tions. He announced that antibodies, excepting antitoxin, had
no relation to the immune state of an animal, and while he him-
self was being ragingly denounced in the small but hectic world
of scientists, he dealt calmly and most brutally with Yersin's and
Marmorek's theories of sera.

His dearest dream, now and for years of racking research, was
the artificial production of antitoxin — its production in vitro.
Once he was prepared to publish, but he found an error and
rigidly suppressed his notes. All the while he was lonely. There
was apparently no one in Queen City who regarded him as
other than a cranky Jew catching microbes by their little tails
and leering at them — no work for a tall man at a time when
heroes were building bridges, experimenting with Horseless Car-
riages, writing the first of the poetic Compelling Ads, and sell-
ing miles of calico and cigars.

In 1899 he was called to the University of Winnemac, as pro-
fessor of bacteriology in the medical school, and here he drudged
on for a dozen years. Not once did he talk of results of the sort
called "practical"; not once did he cease warring on the post hoc
propter hoc conclusions which still make up most medical lore;
not once did he fail to be hated by his colleagues, who were
respectful to his face, uncomfortable in feeling his ironic power,
but privily joyous to call him Mephisto, Diabolist, Killjoy, Pessi-
mist, Destructive Critic, Flippant Cynic, Scientific Bounder
Lacking in Dignity and Seriousness, Intellectual Snob, Pacifist,
Anarchist, Atheist, Jew. They said, with reason, that he was so
devoted to Pure Science, to art for art's sake, that he would
rather have people die by the right therapy than be cured by
the wrong. Having built a shrine for humanity, he wanted to
kick out of it all mere human beings.

127

The total number of his papers, in a brisk scientific realm
where really clever people published five times a year, was not
more than twenty-five in thirty years. They were all exquisitely
finished, all easily reduplicated and checked by the doubtfulest
critics.

At Mohalis he was pleased by large facilities for work, by
excellent assistants, endless glassware, plenty of guinea pigs,
enough monkeys; but he was bored by the round of teaching,
and melancholy again in a lack of understanding friends. Al-
ways he sought someone to whom he could talk without sus-
picion or caution. He was human enough, when he meditated
upon the exaltation of doctors bold through ignorance, of in-
ventors who were but tinkers magnified, to be irritated by his
lack of fame in America, even in Mohalis, and to complain not
too nobly.

He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize,
never been interviewed, never produced anything which the
public could understand, nor experienced anything since his
schoolboy amours which nice people could regard as romantic.
He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.

He was of the great benefactors of humanity. There' will
never, in any age, be an efTort to end the great epidemics or the
petty infections which will not have been influenced by Max
Gottlieb's researches, for he was not one who tagged and prettily
classified bacteria and protozoa. He sought their chemistry, the
laws of their existence and destruction, basic laws for the most
part unknown after a generation of busy biologists. Yet they
were right who called him "pessimist," for this man who, as
much as any other, will have been the cause of reducing infec-
tious diseases to almost-zero often doubted the value of reducing
infectious diseases at all.

He reflected (it was an international debate in which he was
joined by a few and damned by many) that half a dozen gen-
erations nearly free from epidemics would produce a race so
low in natural immunity that when a great plague, suddenly
springing from almost-zero to a world-smothering cloud, ap-
peared again, it might wipe out the world entire, so that the
measures to save lives to which he lent his genius might in the
end be the destruction of all human life.

He meditated that if science and public hygiene did remove

128

tuberculosis and the other major plagues, the world was grimly
certain to become so overcrowded, to become such a universal
slave-packed shambles, that all beauty and ease and wisdom
would disappear in a famine-driven scamper for existence. Yet
these speculations never checked his work. If the future became
overcrowded, the future must by birth-control or otherwise look
to itself. Perhaps it would, he reflected. But even this drop of
wholesome optimism was lacking in his final doubts. For he
doubted all progress of the intellect and the emotions, and he
doubted, most of all, the superiority of divine mankind to the
cheerful dogs, the infallibly graceful cats, the unmoral and un-
agitated and irreligious horses, the superbly adventuring sea-
gulls.

While medical quacks, manufacturers of patent medicines,
chewing-gum salesmen, and high priests of advertising lived in
large houses, attended by servants, and took their sacred persons
abroad in limousines, Max Gottlieb dwelt in a cramped cottage
whose paint was peeling, and rode to his laboratory on an an-
cient and squeaky bicycle. Gottlieb himself protested rarely. He
was not so unreasonable — usually — as to demand both freedom
and the fruits of popular slavery. "Why," he once said to Martin,
"should the world pay me for doing what I want and what
they do not want?"

If in his house there was but one comfortable chair, on his
desk were letters, long, intimate, and respectful, from the great
ones of France and Germany, Italy and Denmark, and from
scientists whom Great Britain so much valued that she gave
them titles almost as high as those with which she rewarded
distillers, cigarette-manufacturers, and the owners of obscene
newspapers.

But poverty kept him from fulfillment of his summer longing
to sit beneath the poplars by the Rhine or the tranquil Seine,
at a table on whose checkered cloth were bread and cheese and
wine and dusky cherries, those ancient and holy simplicities of
all the world.

ii

Max Gottlieb's wife was thick and slow-moving and mute; at
sixty she had not learned to speak easy English; and her Ger-
man was of the small-town bourgeois, who pay their debts and

129

over-eat and grow red. If he was not confidential with her, if
at table he forgot her in long reflections, neither was he unkind
or impatient, and he depended on her housekeeping, her warm-
ing of his old-fashioned nightgown. She had not been well of
iate. She had nausea and indigestion, but she kept on with her
work. Always you heard her old slippers slapping about the
house.

They had three children, all born when Gottlieb was over
thirty-eight: Miriam, the youngest, an ardent child who had a
touch at the piano, an instinct about Beethoven, and hatred for
the "ragtime" popular in America; an older sister who was
nothing in particular; and their boy Robert — Robert Koch Gott-
lieb. He was a wild thing and a distress. They sent him, with
anxiety over the cost, to a smart school near Zenith, where he
met the sons of manufacturers and discovered a taste for fast
motors and eccentric clothes, and no taste whatever for studying.
At home he clamored that his father was a "tightwad." When
Gottlieb sought to make it clear that he was a poor man, the
boy answered that out of his poverty he was always sneakingly
spending money on his researches — he had no right to do that
and shame his son — let the confounded University provide him
with material!

in

There were few of Gottlieb's students who saw him and his
learning as anything but hurdles to be leaped as quickly as
possible. One of the few was Martin Arrowsmith.

However harshly he may have pointed out Martin's errors,
however loftily he may have seemed to ignore his devotion,
Gottlieb was as av/are of Martin as Martin of him. He planned
vast things. If Martin really desired his help (Gottlieb could be
as modest personally as he was egotistic and swaggering in com-
petitive science), he would make the boy's career his own. Dur-
ing Martin's minute original research, Gottlieb rejoiced in his
willingness to abandon conventional — and convenient — theories
of immunology and in the exasperated carefulness with which
he checked results. When Martin for unknown reasons became
careless, when he was obviously drinking too much, obviously
mixed up in some absurd personal affair, it was tragic hunger
for friends and flaming respect for excellent work which drove

130

Gottlieb to snarl at him. Of the apologies demanded by Silva he
had no notion. He would have raged —

He waited for Martin to return. He blamed himself: "Fool!
There was a fine spirit. You should have known one does not
use a platinum loop for shoveling coal." As long as he could
(while Martin was dish-washing and wandering on improbable
trains between impossible towns), he put off the appointment
of a new assistant. Then all his wistfulness chilled to anger.
He considered Martin a traitor, and put him out of his mind

IV

It is possible that Max Gottlieb was a genius. Certainly he was
mad as any genius. He did, during the period of Martin's intern-
ship in Zenith General, a thing more preposterous than any of
the superstitions at which he scoffed.

He tried to become an executive and a reformer! He, the
cynic, the anarch, tried to found an Institution, and he went at
it like a spinster organizing a league to keep small boys from
learning naughty words.

He conceived that there might, in this world, be a medical
school which should be altogether scientific, ruled by exact quan-
titative biology and chemistry, with spectacle-fitting and most of
surgery ignored, and he further conceived that such an enterprise
might be conducted at the University of Winnemac! He tried
to be practical about it; oh, he was extremely practical and
plausible!

"I. admit we should not be able to turn out doctors to cure
village bellyaches. And ordinary physicians are admirable and
altogether necessary — perhaps. But there are too many of them
already. And on the 'practical' side, you gif me twenty years of
a school that is precise and cautious, and we shall cure diabetes,
maybe tuberculosis and cancer, and all these arthritis things that
the carpenters shake their heads at them and call them 'rheuma-
tism.' So!"

He did not desire the control of such a school, nor any credit.
He was too busy. But at a meeting of the American Academy
of Sciences he met one Dr. Entwisle, a youngish physiologist
from Harvard, who would make an excellent dean. Entwisle
admired him, and sounded him on his willingness to be called

131

to Harvard. When Gottlieb outlined his new sort of medical
school, Entwisle was fervent. "Nothing I'd like so much as to
have a chance at a place like that," he fluttered, and Gottlieb
went back to Mohalis triumphant. He was the more assured
because (though he sardonically refused it) he was at this time
ofTered the medical deanship of the University of West Chip-
pewa.

So simple, or so insane, was he that he wrote to Dean Silva
politely bidding him step down and hand over his school — his
work, his life — to an unknown teacher in Harvard! A courteous
old gentleman was Dad Silva, a fit disciple of Osier, but this
incredible letter killed his patience. He replied that while he
could see the value of basic research, the medical school belonged
to the people of the state, and its task was to provide them with
immediate and practical attention. For himself, he hinted, if he
ever believed that the school would profit by his resignation he
would go at once, but he needed a rather broader suggestion
than a letter from one of his own subordinates!

Gottlieb retorted with spirit and indiscretion. He damned the
People of the State of Winnemac. Were they, in their present
condition of nincompoopery, worth any sort of attention? He
unjustifiably took his demand over Silva's head to that great
crator and patriot, Dr. Horace Greeley Truscott, president of
the University.

President Truscott said, "Really, I'm too engrossed to consider
chimerical schemes, however ingenious they may be."

"You are too busy to consider anything but selling honorary
degrees to millionaires for gymnasiums," remarked Gottlieb.

Next day he was summoned to a special meeting of the Uni-
versity Council. As head of the medical department of bacteri-
ology, Gottlieb was a member of this all-ruling body, and when
he entered the long Council Chamber, with its gilt ceiling, its
heavy maroon curtains, its somber paintings of pioneers, he
started for his usual seat, unconscious of the knot of whispering
members, meditating on far-off absorbing things.

"Oh, uh, Professor Gottlieb, will you please sit down there at
the far end of the table?" called President Truscott.

Then Gottlieb was aware of tensions. He saw that out of the
seven members of the Board of Regents, the four who lived in
or near Zenith were present. He saw that sitting beside Truscott

132

was not the dean of the academic department but Dean Silva.
He saw that however easily they talked, they were looking at
him through the mist of their chatter.

President Truscott announced, "'Gentlemen, this joint meeting
of the Council and the regents is to consider charges against
Professor Max Gottlieb preferred by his dean and by myself."

Gottlieb suddenly looked old.

"These charges are: Disloyalty to his dean, his president, his
regents and to the State of Winnemac. Disloyalty to recognized
medical and scholastic ethics. Insane egotism. Atheism. Persistent
failure to collaborate with his colleagues, and such inability to
understand practical affairs as makes it dangerous to let him
conduct the important laboratories and classes with which we
have entrusted him. Gentlemen, I shall now prove each of these
points, from Professor Gottlieb's own letters to Dean Silva."

He proved them.

The chairman of the Board of Regents suggested, "Gottlieb,
I think it would simplify things if you just handed us your resig-
nation and permitted us to part in good feeling, instead of hav-
ing the unpleasant — "

"I'm damned if I will resign!" Gottlieb was on his feet, a lean
fury. "Because you all haf schoolboy minds, golf-links minds,
you are twisting my expression, and perfectly accurate expres-
sion, of a sound revolutionary ideal, which would personally to
me beef no value or advantage whatefer, into a desire to steal
promotions. That fools should judge honor — !" His long fore-
finger was a fish-hook, reaching for President Truscott's soul.
"No! I will not resign! You can cast me out!"

"I'm afraid, then, we must ask you to leave the room while
we vote." The president was very suave, for so large and strong
and hearty a man.

Gottlieb rode his wavering bicycle to the laboratory. It was
by telephone message from a brusque girl clerk in the president's
office that he was informed that "his resignation had been
accepted."

He agonized, "Discharge me? They couldn't! I'm the chief
glory, the only glory, of this shopkeepers' school!" When he
comprehended that apparently they very much had discharged
him, he was shamed that he should have given them a chance
to kick him. But the really dismaying thing was that he should

133

by an effort to be a politician have interrupted the sacred work.

He required peace and a laboratory, at once.

They'd see what fools they were when they heard that Har-
vard had called him!

He was eager for the mellower ways of Cambridge and Bos-
ton. Why had he remained so long in raw Mohalis? He wrote
to Dr. Entwisle, hinting that he was willing to hear an offer.
He expected a telegram. He waited a week, then had a long
letter from Entwisle admitting that he had been premature in
speaking for the Harvard faculty. Entwisle presented the faculty's
compliments and their hope that some time they might have
the honor of his presence, but as things were now —

Gottlieb wrote to the University of West Chippewa that, after
all, he was willing to think about their medical deanship . . .
and had answer that the place was filled, that they had not
greatly liked the tone of his former letter, and they did not "care
to go into the matter further."

At sixty-one, Gottlieb had saved but a few hundred dollars —
literally a few hundred. Like any bricklayer out of work, he
had to have a job or go hungry. He was no longer a genius
impatient of interrupted creation but a shabby schoolmaster in
disgrace.

He prowled through his little brown house, fingering papers,
staring at his wife, staring at old pictures, staring at nothing.
He still had a month of teaching — they had dated ahead the
resignation which they had written for him — but he was too
dispirited to go to the laboratory. He felt unwanted, almost un-
safe. His ancient sureness was broken into self-pity. He waited
from delivery to delivery for the mail. Surely there would be
aid from somebody who knew what he was, what he meanL
There were many friendly letters about research, but the sort
of men with whom he corresponded did not listen to intercol-
legiate faculty tattle nor know of his need.

He could not, after the Harvard mischance and the West
Chippewa rebuke, approach the universities or the scientific in-
stitutes, and he was too proud to write begging letters to the
men who revered him. No, he would be business-like! He
applied to a Chicago teachers' agency, and received a stilted
answer promising to look about and inquiring whether he would

134

care to take the position of teacher of physics and chemistry in
a suburban high school.

Before he had sufficiently recovered from his fury to be able
to reply, his household was overwhelmed by his wife's sudden
agony.

She had been unwell for months. He had wanted her to see
a physician, but she had refused, and all the while she was
stolidly terrified by the fear that she had cancer of the stomach.
Now when she began to vomit blood, she cried to him for help.
The Gottlieb who scoffed at medical credos, at "carpenters" and
"pill mongers," had forgotten what he knew of diagnosis, and
when he was ill, or his family, he called for the doctor as des-
perately as any backwoods layman to whom illness was the
black malignity of unknown devils.

In unbelievable simplicity he considered that, as his quarrel
with Silva was not personal, he could still summon him, and
this time he was justified. Silva came, full of excessive benignity,
chuckling to himself, "When he's got something the matter, he
doesn't run for Arrenhius or Jacques Loeb, but for me!" Into
the meager cottage the little man brought strength, and Gottlieb
gazed down on him trustingly.

Mrs. Gottlieb was suffering. Silva gave her morphine. Not
without satisfaction he learned that Gottlieb did not even know
the dose. He examined her — his pudgy hands had the sensitive-
ness if not the precision of Gottlieb's skeleton fingers. He peered
about the airless bedroom: the dark green curtains, the crucifix
on the dumpy bureau, the color-print of a virtuously voluptuous
maiden. He was bothered by an impression of having recently
been in the room. He remembered. It was the twin of the dole-
ful chamber of a German grocer whom he had seen during a
consultation a month ago.

He spoke to Gottlieb not as to a colleague or an enemy but
as a patient, to be cheered.

"Don't think there's any tumorous mass. As of course you
know, Doctor, you can tell such a1 lot by the differences in the
shape of the lower border of the ribs, and by the surface of the
belly during deep breathing."

"Oh, yesss."

"I don't think you need to worry in the least. We'd better
hustle her off to the University Hospital, and we'll give her a

135

test meal and get her X-rayed and take a look for Boas-Oppler
bugs."

She was taken away, heavy, inert, carried down the cottage
steps. Gottlieb was with her. Whether or not he loved her,
whether he was capable of ordinary domestic affection, could
not be discovered. The need of turning to Dean Silva had
damaged his opinion of his own wisdom. It was the final affront,
more subtle and more enervating than the offer to teach chem-
istry to children. As he sat by her bed, his dark face was blank,
and the wrinkles which deepened across that mask may have
been sorrow, may have been fear. . . . Nor is it known how,
through the secure and uninvaded* years, he had regarded his
wife's crucifix, which Silva had spied on their bureau — a gaudy
plaster crucifix on a box set with gilded shells.

Silva diagnosed it as probable gastric ulcer, and placed her on
treatment, with light and frequent meals. She improved, but
she remained in the hospital for four weeks, and Gottlieb won-
dered: Are these doctors deceiving us? Is it really cancer, which
by Their mystic craft They are concealing from me who know
naught ?

Robbed of her silent assuring presence on which night by
weary night he had depended, he fretted over his daughters,
despaired at their noisy piano-practice, their inability to manage
<.vhe slattern maid. When they had gone to bed he sat alone in
the pale lamplight, unmoving, not reading. He was bewildered.
His haughty self was like a robber baron fallen into the hands
of rebellious slaves, stooped under a filthy load, the proud eye
rheumy and patient with despair, the sword hand chopped off,
obscene flies crawling across the gnawed wrist.

It was at this time that he encountered Martin and Leora on
the street in Zenith.

He did not look back when they had passed him, but all that
afternoon he brooded on them. "That girl, maybe it was she
that stole Martin from me — from science! No! He was right.
One sees what happens to the fools like me!"

On the day after Martin and Leora had started for Wheat-
sylvania, singing, Gottlieb went to Chicago to see the teachers*
agency.

The firm was controlled by a Live Wire who had once been
a county superintendent of schools. He was not much interested.

i36

Gottlieb lost his temper: "Do you make an endeavor to find
positions for teachers, or do you merely send out circulars to
amuse yourself? Haf you looked up my record? Do you know
who I am?"

The agent roared, "Oh, we know about you, all right, all
right! I didn't when I first wrote you, but — ■ You seem to have
a good record as a laboratory man, though I don't see that you've
produced anything of the slightest use in medicine. We had
hoped to give you a chance such as you nor nobody else ever
had. John Edtooth, the Oklahoma oil magnate, has decided to
found a university that for plant and endowment and individu-
ality will beat anything that's ever been pulled off in education —
biggest gymnasium in the world, with an ex-New York Giant
for baseball coach! We thought maybe we might work you in
on the bacteriology or the physiology — I guess you could manage
to teach that, too, if you boned up on it. But we've been making
some inquiries. From some good friends of ours, down Winne-
mac way. And we find that you're not to be trusted with a posi-
tion of real responsibility. Why, they fired you for general in-
competence! But now that you've had your lesson — Do you
think you'd be competent to teach Practical Hygiene in Edtooth
University?"

Gottlieb was so angry that he forgot to speak English, and
as all his cursing was in student German, in a creaky dry voice,
the whole scene was very funny indeed to the cackling book-
keeper and the girl stenographers. When he went from that
place Marx Gottlieb walked slowly, without purpose, and in his
eyes were senile tears.

«?

CHAPTER XIII

NO ONE in the medical world had ever damned more
heartily than Gottlieb the commercialism of certain
large pharmaceutical firms, particularly Dawson T.
Hunziker & Co., Inc., of Pittsburgh. The Hunziker Company
was an old and ethical house which dealt only with reputable
doctors — or practically only with reputable doctors. It furnished
excellent antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus, as well as the
purest of official preparations, with the plainest and most official-
looking labels on the swaggeringly modest brown bottles. Gott-
lieb had asserted that they produced doubtful vaccines, yet he
returned from Chicago to write to Dawson Hunziker that he
was no longer interested in teaching, and he would be willing
to work for them on half time if he might use their laboratories,
on possibly important research, for the rest of the day.

When the letter had gone he sat mumbling. He was certainly
not altogether sane. "Education! Biggest gymnasium in the
world! Incapable of responsibility. Teaching I can do no more.
But Hunziker will laugh at me. I haf told the truth about him
and I shall haf to— Dear Gott, what shall I do?"

Into this still frenzy, while his frightened daughters peered
at him from doorways, hope glided.

The telephone rang. He did not answer it. On the third irasci-
ble burring he took up the receiver and grumbled, "Yes, yes,
vot iss it?"

A twanging nonchalant voice: "This M. C. Gottlieb?"

"This is Dr. Gottlieb!"

"Well, I guess you're the party. Hola wire. Long distance
wants yuh."

Then, "Professor Gottlieb? This is Dawson Hunziker speak-

138

ing. From Pittsburgh. My dear fellow, we should be delighted
to have you join our staff."

«I_ But—"

"I believe you have criticized the pharmaceutical houses —
oh, we read the newspaper clippings very efficiently! — but we
feel that when you come to us and understand the Spirit of the
Old Firm better, you'll be enthusiastic. I hope, by the way, I'm
not interrupting something."

Thus, over certain hundreds of miles, from the gold and blue
drawing-room of his Sewickley home, Hunziker spoke to Max
Gottlieb sitting in his patched easy chair, and Gotdieb grated,
with a forlorn effort at dignity:

"No, it iss all right."

"Well — we shall be glad to offer you five thousand dollars a
year, for a starter, and we shan't worry about the half-time
arrangement. We'll give you all the space and technicians and
material you need, and you just go ahead and ignore us, and
work out whatever seems important to you. Our only request h
that if you do find any serums which are of real value to the
world, we shall have the privilege of manufacturing them, and
if we lose money on 'em, it doesn't matter. We like to make
money, if we can do it honestly, but our chief purpose is tc
serve mankind. Of course if the serums pay, we shall be only
too delighted to give you a generous commission. Now about
practical details — "

ii

Gottlieb, the placidly virulent hater of religious rites, had a
religious-seeming custom.

Often he knelt by his bed and let his mind run free. It was
very much like prayer, though certainly there was no formal
invocation, no consciousness of a Supreme Being — other than
Max Gottlieb. This night, as he knelt, with the wrinkles soften-
ing in his drawn face, he meditated, "I was asinine that I should
ever scold the commercialists! This salesman fellow, he has his
feet on the ground. How much more aut'entic the worst counter-
jumper than frightened professors! Fine dieners! Freedom! Mo
teaching of imbeciles! Du Heiligerl"

But he had no contract with Dawson Hunziker.

139

Ill

In the medical periodicals the Dawson Hunziker Company
published full-page advertisements, most starchy and refined in
type, announcing that Professor Max Gottlieb, perhaps the most
distinguished immunologist in the world, had joined their staff.

In his Chicago clinic, one Dr. Rouncefield chuckled, "That's
what becomes of these super-highbrows. Pardon me if I seem
to grin."

In the laboratories of Ehrlich and Roux, Bordet and Sir David
Bruce, sorrowing men wailed, "How could old Max have gone
over to that damned pill-peddler? Why didn't he come to us?
Oh, well, if he didn't want to — Voilal He is dead."

In the village of Wheatsylvania, in North Dakota, a young
doctor protested to his wife, "Of all the people in the world!
I wouldn't have believed it! Max Gottlieb falling for those
crooks!"

"I don't care!" said his wife. "If he's gone into business, he
had some good reason for it. I told you, I'd leave you for — "

"Oh, well," sighingly, "give and forgive. I learned a lot from
Gottlieb and I'm grateful for — God, Leora, I wish he hadn't
gone wrong!"

And Max Gottlieb, with his three young and a pale, slow-
moving wife, was arriving at the station in Pittsburgh, tugging
a shabby wicker bag, an immigrant bundle, and a Bond Street
dressing-case. From the train he had stared up at the valiant
cliffs, down to the smoke-tinged splendor of the river, and his
heart was young. Here was fiery enterprise, not the flat land and
flat minds of Winnemac. At the station-entrance every dingy
taxicab seemed radiant to him, and he marched forth a con-
queror.

IV

In the Dawson Hunziker building, Gottlieb found such labo-
ratories as he had never planned, and instead of student assist-
ants he had an expert who himself had taught bacteriology, as
well as three swift technicians, one of them German-trained. He
was received with acclaim in the private office of Hunziker,
which was remarkably like a minor cathedral. Hunziker was
bald and business-like as to skull but tortoise-spectacled and sen-

140

,

timental of eye. He stood up at his Jacobean desk, gave Gottlieb
a Havana cigar, and told him that they had awaited him pant-
ingly.

In the enormous staff dining-room Gottlieb found scores of
competent young chemists and biologists who treated him with
reverence. He liked them. If they talked too much of money —
of how much this new tincture of cinchona ought to sell, and
how soon their salaries would be increased — yet they were free
of the careful pomposities of college instructors. As a youngster,
the cap-tilted young Max had been a laughing man, and now in
gusty arguments his laughter came back.

His wife seemed better; his daughter Miriam found an excel-
lent piano teacher; the boy Robert entered college that autumn;
they had a spacious though decrepit house; the relief from the
droning and the annually repeated, inevitable routine of the
classroom was exhilarating; and Gottlieb had never in his life
worked so well. He was unconscious of everything outside of
his laboratory and a few theaters and concert-halls.

Six months passed before he realized that the young technical
experts resented what he considered his jolly thrusts at their
commercialism. They were tired of his mathematical enthusi-
asms and some of them viewed him as an old bore, muttered of
him as a Jew. He was hurt, for he liked to be merry with fellow
workers. He began to ask questions and to explore the Hunziker
building. He had seen nothing of it save his laboratory, a corri-
dor or two, the dining-room, and Hunziker's office.

However abstracted and impractical, Gottlieb would have
made an excellent Sherlock Holmes — if anybody who would
have made an excellent Sherlock Holmes would have been will-
ing to be a detective. His mind burned through appearances to
actuality. He discovered now that the Dawson Hunziker Com-
pany was quite all he had asserted in earlier days. They did
make excellent antitoxins and ethical preparations, but they
were also producing a new "cancer remedy" manufactured from
the orchid, pontifically recommended and possessing all the value
of mud. And to various billboard-advertising beauty companies
they sold millions of bottles of a complexion-cream guaranteed
to turn a Canadian Indian guide as lily-fair as the angels. This
treasure cost six cents a bottle to make and a dollar over the

141

counter, and the name of Dawson Hunziker was never con-
nected with it.

It was at this time that Gottlieb succeeded in his masterwork
after twenty years of seeking. He produced antitoxin in the test-
tube, which meant that it would be possible to immunize against
certain diseases without tediously making sera by the inoculation
of animals. It was a revolution, the revolution, in immunology
... if he was right.

He revealed it at a dinner for which Hunziker had captured
a general, a college president, and a pioneer aviator. It was an
expansive dinner, with admirable hock, the first decent German
wine Gottlieb had drunk in years. He twirled the slender green
glass affectionately; he came out of his dreams and became
excited, gay, demanding. They applauded him, and for an hour
he was a Great Scientist. Of them all, Hunziker was most gen-
erous in his praise. Gottlieb wondered if someone had not
tricked this good bald man into intrigues with the beautifiers.

Hunziker summoned him to the office next day. Hunziker
did his summoning very well indeed (unless it happened to be
merely a stenographer). He sent a glossy morning-coated male
secretary, who presented Mr. Hunziker's compliments to the
much less glossy Dr. Gottlieb, and hinted with the delicacy of
a lilac bud that if it was quite altogether convenient, if it would
not in the least interfere with Dr. Gottlieb's experiments, Mr.
Hunziker would be flattered to see him in the office at a quarter
after three.

When Gottlieb rambled in, Hunziker motioned the secretary
out of existence and drew up a tall Spanish chair.

"I lay awake half the night thinking about your discovery,
Dr. Gottlieb. I've been talking to the technical director and sales-
manager and we feel it's the time to strike. We'll patent your
method of synthesizing antibodies and immediately put them on
the market in large quantities, with a great big advertising cam-
paign— you know — not circus it, of course — strictly high-class
ethical advertising. We'll start with anti-diphtheria serum. By
the way, when you receive your next check you'll find we've
raised your honorarium to seven thousand a year." Hunziker
was a large purring pussy, now, and Gottlieb death-still. "Need
I say, my dear fellow, that if there's the demand I anticipate,
you will have exceedingly large commissions coming!"

142

Hunziker leaned back with a manner of "How's that for
glory, my boy?"

Gottlieb spoke nervously: "I do not approve of patenting sero-
logical processes. They should be open to all laboratories. And
I am strongly against premature production or even announce-
ment. I think I am right, but I must check my technique, per-
haps improve it — be sure. Then, I should think there should be
no objection to market production, but in ve-ry small quantities
and in fair competition with others, not under patents, as if this
was a dinglebat toy for the Christmas tradings!"

"My dear fellow, I quite sympathize. Personally I should like
nothing so much as to spend my whole life in just producing
one priceless scientific discovery, without consideration of mere
profit. But we have our duty toward the stockholders of the
Dawson Hunziker Company to make money for them. Do you
realize that they have — and many of them are poor widows and
orphans — invested their Little All in our stock, and that we must
keep faith? I am helpless; I am but their Humble Servant. And
on the other side: I think we've treated you rather well, Dr.
Gottlieb, and we've given you complete freedom. And we intend
to go on treating you well! Why, man, you'll be rich; you'll be
one of us! I don't like to make any demands, but on this point
it's my duty to insist, and I shall expect you at the earliest pos-
sible moment to start manufacturing — "

Gottlieb was sixty-two. The defeat at Winnemac had done
something to his courage. . . . And he had no contract with
Hunziker.

He protested shakily, but as he crawled back to his laboratory
it seemed impossible for him to leave this sanctuary and face the
murderous brawling world, and quite as impossible to tolerate
a cheapened and ineffective imitation of his antitoxin. He began,
that hour, a sordid strategy which his old proud self would have
called inconceivable; he began to equivocate, to put ofr" announce-
ment and production till he should have "cleared up a few
points," while week on week Hunziker became more threaten-
ing. Meantime he prepared for disaster. He moved his family to
a smaller house, and gave up every luxury, even smoking.

Among his economies was the reduction of his son's allow-
ance.

Robert was a square-rigged, swart, tempestuous boy, arrogant

143

where there seemed to be no reason for arrogance, longed for
by the anemic, milky sort of girls, yet ever supercilious to them.
While his father was alternately proud and amiably sardonic
about his own Jewish blood, the boy conveyed to his classmates
in college that he was from pure and probably noble German
stock. He was welcomed, or half welcomed, in a motoring,
poker-playing, country-club set, and he had to have more money.
Gottlieb missed twenty dollars from his desk. He who ridiculed
conventional honor had the honor, as he had the pride, of a
savage old squire. A new misery stained his incessant bitterness
at having to deceive Hunziker. He faced Robert with, "My boy,
did you take the money from my desk?"

Few youngsters could have faced that jut of his hawk nose,
the red-veined rage of his sunken eyes. Robert spluttered, then
shouted:

"Yes, I did! And I've got to have some more! I've got to get
some clothes and stuff. It's your fault. You bring me up to train
with a lot of fellows that have all the cash in the world, and
then you expect me to dress like a hobo!"

"Stealing—"

"Rats! What's stealing! You're always making fun of these
preachers that talk about Sin and Truth and Honesty and all
those words that've been used so much they don't mean a darn'
thing and — I don't care! Daws Hunziker, the old man's son,
he told me his dad said you could be a millionaire, and then
you keep us strapped like this, and Mom sick — Let me tell you,
back in Mohalis Mom used to slip me a couple of dollars almost
every week and — I'm tired of it! If you're going to keep me
in rags, I'm going to cut out college!"

Gottlieb stormed, but there was no force in it. He did not
know, all the next fortnight, what his son was going to do,
what himself was going to do.

Then, so quietly that not till they had returned from the
cemetery did they realize her passing, his wife died, and the next
week his oldest daughter ran ofr" with a worthless laughing fel-
low who lived by gambling.

Gottlieb sat alone. Over and over he read the Book of Job.
"Truly the Lord hath smitten me and my house," he whispered.
When Robert came in, mumbling that he would be good, the

*44

old man lifted to him a blind face, unhealing. But as he re^
peated the fables of his fathers it did not occur to him to believe,
them, or to stoop in fear before their God of Wrath — or to gain
ease by permitting Hunziker to defile his discovery.

He arose, in time, and went silently to his laboratory. His
experiments were as careful as ever, and his assistants saw no
change save that he did not lunch in hall. He walked blocks
away, to a vile restaurant at which he could save thirty cents
a day.

Out of the dimness which obscured the people about him,
Miriam emerged.

She was eighteen, the youngest of his brood, squat, and in no
way comely save for her tender mouth. She had always been
proud of her father, understanding the mysterious and unreason-
ing compulsions of his science, but she had been in awe till now,
when he walked heavily and spoke rarely. She dropped hei
piano lessons, discharged the maid, studied the cook-book, and
prepared for him the fat crisp dishes that he loved. Her regret
was that she had never learned German, for he dropped now
and then into the speech of his boyhood.

He eyed her, and at length: "So! One is with me. Could you
endure the poverty if I went away — to teach chemistry in a
high school!"

"Yes. Of course. Maybe I could play the piano in a movie
theater."

He might not have done it without her loyalty, but when
Dawson Hunziker next paraded into the laboratory, demanding,
"Now look here. We've fussed long enough. We got to put your
stuff on the market," then Gottlieb answered, "No. If you wait
till I have done all I can — maybe one year, probably three — you
shall have it. But not till I am sure. No."

Hunziker went off huffily, and Gottlieb prepared for sentence.

Then the card of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Director of the
McGurk Institute of Biology, of New York, was brought to him.

Gottlieb knew of Tubbs. He had never visited McGurk but
he considered it, next to Rockefeller and McCormick, the sound-
est and freest organization for pure scientific research in the

country, and if he had pictured a Heavenly laboratory in which
good scientists might spend eternity in happy and thoroughly
impractical research, he would have devised it in the likeness
of McGurk. He was mildly pleased that its director should have
called on him.

Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs was tremendously whiskered on all
visible spots save his nose and temples and the palms of his
hands, short but passionately whiskered, like a Scotch terrier.
Yet they were not comic whiskers; they were the whiskers of
dignity; and his eyes were serious, his step an earnest trot, his
voice a piping solemnity.

"Dr. Gottlieb, this is a great pleasure. I have heard your papers
at the Academy of Sciences but, to my own loss, I have hitherto
failed to have an introduction to you."

Gottlieb tried not to sound embarrassed.

Tubbs looked at the assistants, like a plotter in a political play,
and hinted, "May we have a talk — "

Gottlieb led him to his office, overlooking a vast bustle of side-
tracks, of curving rails and brown freight-cars, and Tubbs urged :

"It has come to our attention, by a curious chance, that you
are on the eve of your most significant discovery. We all won-
dered, when you left academic work, at your decision to enter
the commercial field. We wished that you had cared to come
to us."

"You would have taken me in? I needn't at all have come
here?"

"Naturally! Now from what we hear, you are not giving your
attention to the commercial side of things, and that tempts us
to wonder whether you could be persuaded to join us at Mc-
Gurk. So I just sprang on a train and ran down here. We
should be delighted to have you become a member of the insti-
tute, and chief of the Department of Bacteriology and Im-
munology. Mr. McGurk and I desire nothing but the advance-
ment of science. You would, of course, have absolute freedom
as to what researches you thought it best to pursue, and I think
we could provide as good assistance and material as would be
obtainable anywhere in the world. In regard to salary — permit
me to be business-like and perhaps blunt, as my train leaves in
one hour — I don't suppose we could equal the doubtless large

146

emolument which the Hunziker people are able to pay you,
but we can go to ten thousand dollars a year — "

"Oh, my God, do not talk of the money! I shall be wit' you
in New York one week from today. You see," said Gottiieb, "I
haf no contract here!"

w

CHAPTER XIV

A LL afternoon they drove in the flapping buggy across the

ZA long undulations of the prairie. To their wandering
X. JL there was no barrier, neither lake nor mountain nor
ractory-bristling city, and the breeze about them was flowing
sunshine.

Martin cried to Leora, "I feel as if all the Zenith dust and
hospital lint were washed out of my lungs. Dakota. Real man's
country. Frontier. Opportunity. America!"

From the thick swale the young prairie chickens rose. As he
watched them sweep across the wheat, his sun-drowsed spirit
was part of the great land, and he was almost freed of the
impatience with which he had started out from Wheatsylvania.

"If you're going driving, don't forget that supper is six o'clock
sharp," Mrs. Tozer had said, smiling to sugar-coat it.

On Main Street, Mr. Tozer waved to them and shouted, "Be
back by six. Supper at six o'clock sharp."

Bert Tozer ran out from the bank, like a country schoolmaster
skipping from a one-room schoolhouse, and cackled, "Say, you
folks better not forget to be back at six o'clock for supper or
the Old Man'll have a fit. He'll expect you for supper at six
o'clock sharp, and when he says six o'clock sharp, he means six
o'clock sharp, and not five minutes past six!"

"Now that," observed Leora, "is funny, because in my twenty-
two years in Wheatsylvania I remember three different times
when supper was as late as seven minutes after six. Let's get
out of this, Sandy. ... I wonder were we so wise to live with
the family and save money?"

Before they had escaped from the not very extensive limits of
Wheatsylvania they passed Ada Quist, the future Mrs. Bert

148

Tozer, and through the lazy air they heard her voice slashing:
"Better be home by six."

Martin would be heroic. "We'll by golly get back when we're
by golly good and ready!" he said to Leora; but on them both
was the cumulative dread of the fussing voices, beyond every
breezy prospect was the order, "Be back at six sharp"; and they
whipped up to arrive at eleven minutes to six, as Mr. Tozer was
returning from the creamery, full thirty seconds later than usual.

"Glad to see you among us," he said. "Hustle now and get
that horse in the livery stable. Supper's at six — sharp!"

Martin survived it sufficiently to sound domestic when he
announced at the supper-table:

"We had a bully drive. I'm going to like it here. Well, I've
loafed for a day and a half, and now I've got to get busy. First
thing is, I must find a location for my office. What is there
vacant, Father Tozer?"

Mrs. Tozer said brightly, "Oh, I have such a nice idea, Martin.
Why can't v/e fix up an office for you out in the barn? It'd be
so handy to the house, for you to get to meals on time, and
you could keep an eye on the house if the girl was out and Ory
and I went out visiting or to the Embroidery Circle."

"In the barn!"

"Why, yes, in the old harness room. It's partly ceiled, and we
could put in some nice tar paper or even beaver board."

"Mother Tozer, what the dickens do you think I'm planning
to do? I'm not a hired man in a livery stable, or a kid looking
for a place to put his birds' eggs! I was thinking of opening an
office as a physician!"

Bert made it all easy: "Yuh, but you aren't much of a physi-
cian yet. You're just getting your toes in."

"I'm one hell of a good physician! Excuse me for cussing,
Mother Tozer, but — Why, nights in the hospital, I've held
hundreds of lives in my hand! I intend — "

"Look here, Mart," said Bertie. "As we're putting up the
money — I don't want to be a tightwad but after all, a dollar is
a dollar — if we furnish the dough, we've got to decide the best
way to spend it."

Mr. Tozer looked thoughtful and said helplessly, "That's so.
No sense taking a risk, with the blame' farmers demanding all
the money they can get for their wheat and cream, and then

149

deliberately going to work and not paying the interest on their
loans. I swear, it don't hardly pay to invest in mortgages any
longer. No sense putting on lugs. Stands to reason you can look
at a fellow's sore throat or prescribe for an ear-ache just as well
in a nice simple little office as in some fool place all fixed up like
a Moorhead saloon. Mother will see you have a comfortable
corner in the barn — "

Leora intruded: "Look here, Papa. I want you to lend us one
thousand dollars, outright, to use as we see fit." The sensation
was immense. "We'll pay you six per cent — no, we won't; we'll
pay you five; that's enough."

"And mortgages bringing six, seven, and eight!" Bert quav-
ered.

"Five's enough. And we want our own say, absolute, as to
how we use it — to fit up an office or anything else."

Mr. Tozer began, "That's a foolish way to — "

Bert took it away from him: "Ory, you're crazy! I suppose
we'll have to lend you some money, but you'll blame well come
to us for it from time to time, and you'll blame well take our
advice — "

Leora rose. "Either you do what I say, just exactly what I
say, or Mart and I take the first train and go back to Zenith,
and I mean it! Plenty of places open for him there, with a big
salary, so we won't have to be dependent on anybody!"

There was much conversation, most of which sounded like
all the rest of it. Once Leora started for the stairs, to go up
and pack; once Martin and she stood waving their napkins as
they shook their fists, the general composition remarkably like
the Laocoon.

Leora won.

They settled down to the most solacing fussing.

"Did you bring your trunk up from the depot?" asked Mr.
Tozer.

"No sense leaving it there — paying two bits a day storage!"
fumed Bert.

"I got it up this morning," said Martin.

"Oh, yes, Martin had it brought up this morning," agreed
Mrs. Tozer.

"You had it brought? Didn't you bring it up yourself?"
agonized Mr. Tozer.

150

"No. I had the fellow that runs the lumberyard haul it up
for me," said Martin.

"Well, gosh almighty, you could just as well've put it on a
wheelbarrow and brought it up yourself and saved a quarter!"
said Bert.

"But a doctor has to keep his dignity," said Leora.

"Dignity, rats! Blame sight more dignified to be seen shoving
a wheelbarrow than smoking them dirty cigarettes all the time!"

"Well, anyway — Where'd you put it?" asked Mr. Tozer.

"It's up in our room," said Martin.

"Where'd you think we better put it when it's unpacked?
The attic is awful' full," Mr. Tozer submitted to Mrs. Tozer.

"Oh, I think Martin could get it in there."

"Why couldn't he put it in the barn?"

"Oh, not a nice new trunk like that!"

"What's the matter with the barn?" said Bert. "It's all nice
and dry. Seems a shame to waste all that good space in the
barn, now that you've gone and decided he mustn't have his
dear little office there!"

"Bertie," from Leora, "I know what we'll do. You seem to
have the barn on your brain. You move your old bank there,
and Martin'll take the bank building for his office."

"That's entirely different — "

"Now there's no sense you two showing off* and trying to be
smart," protested Mr. Tozer. "Do you ever hear your mother
and I scrapping and fussing like that? When do you think
you'll have your trunk unpacked, Mart?" Mr. Tozer could con-
sider barns and he could consider trunks but his was not a brain
to grasp two such complicated matters at the same time.

"I can get it unpacked tonight, if it makes any difference—"

"Well, I don't suppose it really makes any special difference,
but when you start to do a thing — "

"Oh, what difference does it make whether he — "

"If he's going to look for an office, instead of moving right
into the barn, he can't take a month of Sundays getting m>
packed and — "

"Oh, good Lord, I'll get it done tonight — "

"And I think we can get it in the attic — "

"I tell you it's jam full already — "

"We'll go take a look at it after supper — "

151

"Well now, I tell you when I tried to get that duck-boat in — *
Martin probably did not scream, but he heard himself scream-
ing. The free and virile land was leagues away and for years
forgotten.

ii

To find an office took a fortnight of diplomacy, and of discus-
sion brightening three meals a day, every day. (Not that office-
finding was the only thing the Tozers mentioned. They went
thoroughly into every moment of Martin's day; they commented
on his digestion, his mail, his walks, his shoes that needed cob-
bling, and whether he had yet taken them to the farmer-trapper-
cobbler, and how much the cobbling ought to cost, and the pre-
sumable theology, politics, and marital relations of the cobbler.)

Mr. Tozer had from the first known the perfect office. The
Norbloms lived above their general store, and Mr. Tozer knew
that the Norbloms were thinking of moving. There was indeed
nothing that was happening or likely to happen in Wheatsyl-
vania which Mr. Tozer did not know and explain. Mrs. Nor-
blom was tired of keeping house, and she wanted to go to Mrs.
Beeson's boarding house (to the front room, on the right as you
went along the up-stairs hall, the room with the plaster walls
and the nice little stove that Mrs. Beeson bought from Otto
Krag for seven dollars and thirty-five cents — no, seven and a
quarter it was).

They called on the Norbloms and Mr. Tozer hinted that "it
might be nice for the Doctor to locate over the store, if the
Norbloms were thinking of making any change — "

The Norbloms stared at each other, with long, bleached, cau-
tious, Scandinavian stares, and grumbled that they "didn't \now
— of course it was the finest location in town — " Mr. Norblom
admitted that if, against ail probability, they ever considered
moving, they would probably ask twenty-five dollars a month
for the flat, unfurnished.

Mr. Tozer came out of the international conference as craftily
joyful as any Mr. Secretary Tozer or Lord Tozer in Washington
or London:

"Fine! Fine! We made him commit himself! Twenty-five, he
says. That means, when the time's ripe, we'll offer him eighteen
and close for twenty-one-seventy-five. If we just handle him

152

careful, and give him time to go see Mrs. Beeson and fix up
about boarding with her, we'll have him just where we want
him!"

"Oh, if the Norbloms can't make up their minds, then let's
try something else," said Martin. "There's a couple of vacant
rooms behind the Eagle office."

"What? Go chasing around, after we've given the Norbloms
reason to think we're serious, and make enemies of 'em for life?
Now that would be a fine way to start building up a practice,
wouldn't it! And I must say I wouldn't blame the Norbloms
one bit for getting wild if you let 'em down like that. This
ain't Zenith, where you can go yelling around expecting to get
things done in two minutes!"

Through a fortnight, while the Norbloms agonized over de-
ciding to do what they had long ago decided to do, Martin
waited, unable to begin work. Until he should open a certified
and recognizable office, most of the village did not regard him
as a competent physician but as "that son-in-law of Andy
Tozer's." In the fortnight he was called only once: for the sick-
headache of Miss Agnes Ingleblad, aunt and housekeeper of
Alec Ingleblad the barber. He was delighted, till Bert Tozer
explained:

"Oh, so she called you in, eh? She's always doctorin' around.
There ain't a thing the matter with her, but she's always trying
out the latest stunt. Last time it was a fellow that come through
here selling pills and liniments out of a Ford, and the time
before that it was a faith-healer, crazy loon up here at Dutch-
man's Forge, and then for quite a spell she doctored with an
osteopath in Leopolis — though I tell you there's something to
this osteopathy — they cure a lot of folks that you regular dors
can't seem to find out what's the matter with 'em, don't you
think so?"

Martin remarked that he did not think so.

"Oh, you docs!" Bert crowed in his most jocund manner, for
Bert could be very joky and bright. "You're all alike, especially
when you're just out of school and think you know it all. You
can't see any good in chiropractic or electric belts or bone-setters
or anything, because they take so many good dollars away from
you."

Then behold the Dr. Martin Arrowsmith who had once in-

153

furiated Angus Duer and Irving Watters by his sarcasm on
medical standards upholding to a lewdly grinning Bert Tozer
the benevolence and scientific knowledge of all doctors; pro-
claiming that no medicine had ever (at least by any Winnemac
graduate) been prescribed in vain nor any operation needlessly
performed.

He saw a good deal of Bert now. He sat about the bank,
hoping to be called on a case, his fingers itching for bandages.
Ada Quist came in with frequency and Bert laid aside his figur-
ing to be coy with her:

"You got to be careful what you even think about, when the
doc is here, Ade. He's been telling me what a whale of a lot
of neurology and all that mind-reading stuff he knows. How
about it, Mart? I'm getting so scared that I've changed the com-
bination on the safe."

"Heh!" said Ada. "He may fool some folks but he can't fool
me. Anybody can learn things in books, but when it comes to
practicing 'em — Let me tell you, Mart, if you ever have one-
tenth of the savvy that old Dr. Winter of Leopolis has, you'll
live longer than I expect!"

Together they pointed out that for a person who felt his
Zenith training had made him so "gosh-awful' smart that he
sticks up his nose at us poor hicks of dirt-farmers," Martin's
scarf was rather badly tied.

All of his own wit and some of Ada's Bert repeated at the
supper table.

"You oughtn't to ride the boy so hard. Still, that was pretty
cute about the necktie — I guess Mart does think he's some pun-
kins," chuckled Mr. Tozer.

Leora took Martin aside after supper. "Darling can you stand
it? We'll have our own house, soon as we can. Or shall we

vamoose r

"I'm by golly going to stand it!"

"Urn. Maybe. Dear, when you hit Bertie, do be careful —
they'll hang you."

He ambled to the front porch. He determined to view the
rooms behind the Eagle office. Without a retreat in which to be
safe from Bert he could not endure another week. He could not
wait for the Norbloms to make up their minds, though they
had become to him dread and eternal figures whose enmity

154

would crush him; prodigious gods shadowing this Wheatsyl
vania which was the only perceptible world.

He was aware, in the late sad light, that a man was tramping
the plank walk before the house, hesitating and peering at him.
The man was one Wise, a Russian Jew known to the village at
"Wise the Polack." In his shack near the railroad he sold silver
stock and motor-factory stock, bought and sold farmlands and
horses and muskrat hides. He called out, "That you, Doc?"

"Yup!"

Martin was excited. A patient!

"Say, I wish you'd walk down a ways with me. Couple things
I'd like to talk to you about. Or say, come on over to my place
and sample some new cigars I've got." He emphasized the word
"cigars." North Dakota was, like Mohalis, theoretically dry.

Martin was pleased. He had been sober and industrious ro
long now!

Wise's shack was a one-story structure, not badly built, half a
block from Main Street, with nothing but the railroad track
between it and open wheat country. It was lined with pine,
pleasant-smelling under the stench of old pipe-smoke. Wise
winked — he was a confidential, untrustworthy wisp of a man —
and murmured, "Think you could stand a little jolt of first-
class Kentucky bourbon?"

"Well, I wouldn't get violent about it."

Wise pulled down the sleazy window-shades and from a
warped drawer of his desk brought up a bottle out of which
they both drank, wiping the mouth of the bottle with circling
palms. Then Wise, abruptly:

"Look here, Doc. You're not like these hicks; you understand
that sometimes a fellow gets mixed up in crooked business he
didn't intend to. Well, make a long story short, I guess I've sold
too much mining stock, and they'll be coming down on me.
I've got to be moving — curse it — hoped I could stay settled for
couple of years, this time. Well, I hear you're looking for an
office. This place would be ideal. Ideal! Two rooms at the back
besides this one. I'll rent it to you, furniture and the whole
shooting-match, for fifteen dollars a month, if you'll pay me one
year in advance. Oh, this ain't phony. Your brother-in-law
knows all about my ownership."

Martin tried to be very business-like. Was he not a young

155

doctor who would soon be investing money, one of the most
Substantial Citizens in Wheatsylvania ? He returned home, and
under the parlor lamp, with its green daisies on pink glass, the
Tozers listened acutely, Bert stooping forward with open mouth.

"You'd be safe renting it for a year, but that ain't the point,"
said Bert.

"It certainly isn't! Antagonize the Norbloms, now that they've
almost made up their minds to let you have their place? Make
me a fool, after all the trouble I've taken?" groaned Mr. Tozer.

They went over it and over it till almost ten o'clock, but
Martin was resolute, and the next day he rented Wise's shack.

For the first time in his life he had a place utterly his own,
his and Leora's.

In his pride of possession this was the most lordly building
on earth, and every rock and weed and doorknob was peculiar
and lovely. At sunset he sat on the back stoop (a very interesting
and not too broken soap-box) and from the flamboyant horizon
the open country flowed across the thin band of the railroad to
his feet. Suddenly Leora was beside him, her arm round his
neck, and he hymned all the glory of their future:

"Know what I found in the kitchen here? A dandy old auger,
hardly rusty a bit, and I can take a box and make a test-tube
rack ... of my own!"

156

CHAPTER XV

WITH none of the profane observations on "medical
peddlers" which had annoyed Digamma Pi, Martin
studied the catalogue of the New Idea Instrument
and Furniture Company, of Jersey City. It was a handsome
thing. On the glossy green cover, in red and black, were the
portraits of the president, a round quippish man who loved all
young physicians; the general manager, a cadaverous scholarly
man who surely gave all his laborious nights and days to the
advancement of science; and the vice-president, Martin's former
preceptor, Dr. Roscoe Geake, who had a lively, eye-glassed, for-
ward-looking modernity all his own. The cover also contained,
in surprisingly small space, a quantity of poetic prose, and the
inspiring promise:

Doctor, don't be buffaloed by the unenterprising. No reason
why you should lac\ the equipment which impresses patients,
makes practice easy, and brings honor and riches. All the high-
class supplies which distinguish the Leaders of the Profession
from the Dubs are within your reach right now by the famous
New Idea Financial System: "fust a little down and the rest
free — out of the increased earnings which New Idea apparatus
will bring you!"

I Above, in a border of laurel wreaths and Ionic capitals, was
the challenge:
Sing not the glory of soldiers or explorers or statesmen for
who can touch the doctor — wise, heroic, uncontaminated by
common greed. Gentlemen, we salute you humbly and herewith
offer you the tnost up-to-the-jiffy catalogue ever presented by any
surgical supply house.
157

The back cover, though it was less glorious with green and
red, was equally arousing. It presented illustrations of the Bin-
dledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit and of an electric cabinet, with the
demand :

Doctor, are you sending your patients off to specialists for ton-
sil removal or to sanitoriums for electric, etc., treatment? If so,
you are losing the chance to show yourself one of the distin-
guished powers in the domain of medical advancement in your
locality, and losing a lot of big fees. Don't you want to be a
high-class practitioner? Here's the Open Door.

The Bindledorf Outfit is not only useful but exquisitely beauti-
ful, adorns and gives class to any office. We guarantee that by
the installation of a Bindledorf Outfit and a New Idea Panace-
atic Electro-T herapeutic Cabinet {see details on pp. 34 and gy)
you can increase your income from a thousand to ten thousand
annually and please patients more than by the most painstaking
plugging.

When the Great Call sounds, Doctor, and it's time for you to
face your reward, will you be satisfied by a big Masonic funeral
and tributes from Grateful Patients if you have failed to lay up
provision for the kiddies, and faithful wife who has shared your
tribulations?

You may drive through blizzard and August heat, and go
down into the purple-shadowed vale of sorrow and wrestle with
the ebon-cloa\ed Powers of Darkness for the lives of your pa-
tients, but that heroism is incomplete without Modern Progress,
to be obtained by the use of a Bindledorf Tonsillectomy Outfit
and the New Idea Panaceatic Cabinet, to be obtained on small
payment down, rest on easiest terms \nown in history of
medicine!

11

This poetry of passion Martin neglected, for his opinion of
poetry was like his opinion of electric cabinets, but excitedly he
ordered a steel stand, a sterilizer, flasks, test-tubes, and a white-
enameled mechanism with enchanting levers and gears which
transformed it from examining-chair to operating-table. He
yearned over the picture of a centrifuge while Leora was admir-
ing the "stunning seven-piece Reception Room fumed oak set,

158

upholstered in genuine Barcelona Longware Leatherette, will
give your office the class and distinction of any high-grade New
York specialist's."

"Aw, let 'em sit on plain chairs," Martin grunted.

In the attic Mrs. Tozer found enough seedy chairs for the
reception-room, and an ancient bookcase which, when Leora had
lined it with pink fringed paper, became a noble instrument-
cabinet. Till the examining-chair should arrive, Martin would
use Wise's lumpy couch, and Leora busily covered it with white
oilcloth. Behind the front room of the tiny office-building were
two cubicles, formerly bedroom and kitchen. Martin made them
into consultation-room and laboratory. Whistling, he sawed out
racks for the glassware and turned the oven of a discarded
kerosene stove into a hot-air oven for sterilizing glassware.

"But understand, Lee, I'm not going to go monkeying with
any scientific research. I'm through with all that."

Leora smiled innocently. While he worked she sat outside in
the long wild grass, sniffing the prairie breeze, her hands about
her ankles, but every quarter-hour she had to come in and
admire.

Mr. Tozer brought home a package at suppertime. The family
opened it, babbling. After supper Martin and Leora hastened
with the new treasure to the office and nailed it in place. It was
a plate-glass sign; on it in gold letters, "M. Arrowsmith, M.D."
They looked up, arms about each other, squealing softly, and
in reverence he grunted, "There — by — jiminy!"

They sat on the back stoop, exulting in freedom from Tozers.
Along the railroad bumped a freight train with a cheerful clank-
ing. The fireman waved to them from the engine, a brakeman
from the platform of the red caboose. After the train there was
silence but for the crickets and a distant frog.

"I've never been so happy," he murmured.

in

He had brought from Zenith his own Ochsner surgical case.
As he laid out the instruments he admired the thin, sharp, shin-
ing bistoury, the strong tenotome, the delicate curved needles.
With them was a dental forceps. Dad Silva had warned his
classes, "Don't forget the country doctor often has to be not only

159

physician but dentist, yes, and priest, divorce lawyer, blacksmith,
chauffeur, and road engineer, and if you are too lily-handed for
those trades, don't get out of sight of a trolley line and a beauty
parlor." And the first patient whom Martin had in the new
office, the second patient in Wheatsylvania, was Nils Krag, the
carpenter, roaring with an ulcerated tooth. This was a week
before the glass sign was up, and Martin rejoiced to Leora,
"Begun already! You'll see 'em tumbling in now."

They did not see them tumbling in. For ten days Martin
tinkered at his hot-air oven or sat at his desk, reading and trying
to look busy. His first joy passed into fretfulness, and he could
have yelped at the stillness, the inactivity.

Late one afternoon, when he was in a melancholy way pre-
paring to go home, into the office stamped a grizzled Swedish
farmer who grumbled, "Doc, I got a fish-hook caught in my
thumb and it's all swole." To Arrowsmith, intern in Zenith
General Hospital with its out-patient clinic treating hundreds
a day, the dressing of a hand had been less important than bor-
rowing a match, but to Dr. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania it
was a hectic operation, and the farmer a person remarkable and
very charming. Martin shook his left hand violently and burbled,
"Now if there's anything, you just 'phone me — you just 'phone
me."

There had been, he felt, a rush of admiring patients sufficient
to justify them in the one thing Leora and he longed to do, the
thing about which they whispered at night: the purchase of a
motor car for his country calls.

They had seen the car at Frazier's store.

It was a Ford, five years old, with torn upholstery, a gummy
motor, and springs made by a blacksmith who had never made
springs before. Next to the chugging of the gas engine at the
creamery, the most familiar sound in Wheatsylvania was Fra-
zier's closing the door of his Ford. He banged it flatly at the
store, and usually he had to shut it thrice again before he reached
home.

But to Martin and Leora, when they had tremblingly bought
the car and three new tires and a horn, it was the most impres-
sive vehicle on earth. It was their own; they could go when and
where they wished.

During his summer at a Canadian hotel Martin had learned

160

to drive the Ford station wagon, but it was Leora's first venture.
Bert had given her so many directions that she had refused to
drive the family Overland. When she first sat at the steering
wheel, when she moved the hand-throttle with her little finger
and felt in her own hands all this power, sorcery enabling her
to go as fast as she might desire (within distinct limits), she
transcended human strength, she felt that she could fly like the
wild goose — and then in a stretch of sand she killed the engine.
Martin became the demon driver of the village. To ride with
him was to sit holding your hat, your eyes closed, waiting for
death. Apparently he accelerated for corners, to make them more
interesting. The sight of anything on the road ahead, from an-
other motor to a yellow pup, stirred in him a frenzy which could
be stilled only by going up and passing it. The village adored,
"The Young Doc is quite some driver, all right." They waited,
with amiable interest, to hear that he had been killed. It is pos-
sible that half of the first dozen patients who drifted into his
office came because of awe at his driving . . . the rest because
there was nothing serious the matter, and he was nearer than
Dr. Hesselink at Groningen.

IV

With his first admirers he developed his first enemies.

When he met the Norbloms on the street (and in Wheat-
sylvania it is difficult not to meet everyone on the street every
day), they glared. Then he antagonized Pete Yeska.

Pete conducted what he called a "drug store," devoted to the
sale of candy, soda water, patent medicines, fly paper, magazines,
washing-machines, and Ford accessories, yet Pete would have
starved if he had not been postmaster also. He alleged that he
was a licensed pharmacist but he so mangled prescriptions that
Martin burst into the store and addressed him piously.

"You young docs make me sick," said Pete. "I was putting
up prescriptions when you was in the cradle. The old doc that
used to be here sent everything to me. My way o' doing things
suits me, and I don't figure on changing it for you or any other
half-baked young string-bean."

Thereafter Martin had to purchase drugs from St. Paul, over-
crowd his tiny laboratory, and prepare his own pills and oint-

161

ments, looking in a homesick way at the rarely used test-tubes
and the dust gathering on the bell glass of his microscope, while
Pete Yeska joined with the Norbloms in whispering, "This new
doc here ain't any good. You better stick to Hesselink."

So blank, so idle, had been the week that when he heard the
telephone at the Tozers', at three in the morning, he rushed
to it as though he were awaiting a love message.

A hoarse and shaky voice: "I want to speak to the doctor."

"Yuh — yuh — 'S the doctor speaking."

"This is Henry Novak, four miles northeast, on the Leopolis
road. My little girl, Mary, she has a terrible sore throat. I think
maybe it is croup and she look awful and — Could you come
right away?"

"You bet. Be right there."

Four miles — he would do it in eight minutes.

He dressed swiftly, dragging his worn brown tie together,
while Leora beamed over the first night call. He furiously
cranked the Ford, banged and clattered past the station and
into the wheat prairie. When he had gone six miles by the speed-
ometer, slackening at each rural box to look for the owner's
name, he realized that he was lost. He ran into a farm driveway
and stopped under the willows, his headlight on a heap of
dented milk-cans, broken harvester wheels, cordwood, and bam-
boo fishing-poles. From the barn dashed a woolly anomalous
dog, barking viciously, leaping up at the car.

A frowsy head protruded from a ground-floor window. "What
you want?" screamed a Scandinavian voice.

"This is The Doctor. Where does Henry Novak live?"

"Oh! The Doctor! Dr. Hesselink?"

"No! Dr. Arrowsmith."

"Oh. Dr. Arrowsmith. From Wheatsylvania? Um. Well, you
went right near his place. You yoost turn back one mile and
turn to the right by the brick schoolhouse, and it's about forty
rods up the road — the house with a cement silo. Somebody sick
by Henry's?"

"Yuh — yuh — girl's got croup — thanks — "

"Yoost keep to the right. You can't miss it."

162

Probably no one who has listened to the dire "you can't misi
it" has ever failed to miss it.

Martin swung the Ford about, grazing a slashed chopping
block; he rattled up the road, took the corner that side of the
schoolhouse instead of this, ran half a mile along a boggy trail
between pastures, and stopped at a farmhouse. In the surpris-
ing fall of silence, cows were to be heard feeding, and a white
horse, startled in the darkness, raised its head to wonder at him.
He had to arouse the house with wild squawkings of his horn,
and an irate farmer who bellowed, "Who's there? I've got a
shotgun!" sent him back to the country road.

It was forty minutes from the time of the telephone call when
he rushed into a furrowed driveway and saw on the doorstep,
against the lamplight, a stooped man who called, "The Doctor?
This is Novak."

He found the child in a newly finished bedroom of white
plastered walls and pale varnished pine. Only an iron bed, a
straight chair, a chromo of St. Anne, and a shadeless hand-
lamp on a rickety stand broke the staring shininess of the apart-
ment, a recent extension of the farmhouse. A heavy-shouldered
woman was kneeling by the bed. As she lifted her wet red face,
Novak urged:

"Don't cry now; he's here!" And to Martin: "The little one
is pretty bad but we done all we could for her. Last night and
tonight we steam her throat, and we put her here in our own
bedroom!"

Mary was a child of seven or eight. Martin found her lips and
finger-tips blue, but in her face no flush. In the effort to expel
her breath she writhed into terrifying knots, then coughed up
saliva dotted with grayish specks. Martin worried as he took out
his clinical thermometer and gave it a professional-looking shake.

It was, he decided, laryngeal croup or diphtheria. Probably
diphtheria. No time now for bacteriological examination, for
cultures and leisurely precision. Silva the healer bulked in the
room, crowding out Gottlieb the inhuman perfectionist. Martin
leaned nervously over the child on the tousled bed, absent-
mindedly trying her pulse again and again. He felt helpless
without the equipment of Zenith General, its nurses and Angus
Duer's sure advice. He had a sudden respect for the lone coun-
try doctor.

163

He had to make a decision, irrevocable, perhaps perilous. He
would use diphtheria antitoxin. But certainly he could not ob-
tain it from Pete Yeska's in Wheatsylvania.

Leopolis ?

"Hustle up and get me Blassner, the druggist at Leopolis, on
the phone," he said to Novak, as calmly as he could contrive.
He pictured Blassner driving through the night, respectfully
bringing the antitoxin to The Doctor. While Novak bellowed
into the farm-line telephone in the dining-room, Martin waited
— waited — staring at the child; Mrs. Novak waited for him to do
miracles; the child's tossing and hoarse gasping became horrible;
and the glaring walls, the glaring lines of pale yellow wood-
work, hypnotized him into sleepiness. It was too late for any-
thing short of antitoxin or tracheotomy. Should he operate; cut
into the wind-pipe that she might breathe? He stood and wor-
ried; he drowned in sleepiness and shook himself awake. He
had to do something, with the mother kneeling there, gaping
at him, beginning to look doubtful.

"Get some hot cloths — towels, napkins — and keep 'em around
her neck. I wish to God he'd get that telephone call!" he fretted.

As Mrs. Novak, padding on thick slippered feet, brought in
the hot cloths, Novak appeared with a blank "Nobody sleeping
at the drug store, and Blassner 's house-line is out of order."

"Then listen. I'm afraid this may be serious. I've got to have
antitoxin. Going to drive t' Leopolis and get it. You keep up
these hot applications and — Wish we had an atomizer. And
room ought to be moister. Got 'n alcohol stove? Keep some
water boiling in here. No use of medicine. B' right back."

He drove the twenty-four miles to Leopolis in thirty-sever,
minutes. Not once did he slow down for a cross-road. He defied
the curves, the roots thrusting out into the road, though always
one dark spot in his mind feared a blow-out and a swerve. The
speed, the casting away of all caution, wrought in him a high
exultation, and it was blessed to be in the cool air and alone,
after the strain of Mrs. Novak's watching. In his mind all the
while was the page in Osier regarding diphtheria, the very pic-
ture of the words: "In severe cases the first dose should be from
8,000 — " No. Oh, yes: " — from 10,000 to 15,000 units."

He regained confidence. He thanked the god of science for

164

antitoxin and for the gas motor. It was, he decided, a Race with
Death.

"I'm going to do it — going to pull it off and save that poor
kid!" he rejoiced.

He approached a grade crossing and hurled toward it, ignor-
ing possible trains. He was aware of a devouring whistle, saw
sliding light on the rails, and brought up sharp. Past him, ten
feet from his front wheels, flung the Seattle Express like a flying
volcano. The fireman was stoking, and even in the thin clearness
of coming dawn the glow from the fire-box was appalling on
the under side of the rolling smoke. Instantly the apparition was
gone and Martin sat trembling, hands trembling on the little
steering-wheel, foot trembling like St. Vitus's dance on the
brake. "That was an awful' close thing!" he muttered, and
thought of a widowed Leora, abandoned to Tozers. But the
vision of the Novak child, struggling for each terrible breath,
overrode all else. "Hell! I've killed the engine!" he groaned. He
vaulted over the side, cranked the car, and dashed into Leopolis.

To Crynssen County, Leopolis with its four thousand people
was a metropolis, but in the pinched stillness of the dawn it was
a tiny graveyard: Main Street a sandy expanse, the low shops
desolate as huts. He found one place astir; in the bleak office of
the Dakota Hotel the night clerk was playing poker with the
'bus-driver and the town policeman.

They wondered at his hysterical entrance.

"Dr. Arrowsmith, from Wheatsylvania. Kid dying from diph-
theria. Where's Blassner live? Jump in my car and show me."

The constable was a lanky old man, his vest swinging open
over a collarless shirt, his trousers in folds, his eyes resolute. He
guided Martin to the home of the druggist, he kicked the door,
then, standing with his lean and bristly visage upraised in the
cold early light, he bawled, "Ed! Hey, you, Ed! Come out of it!"

Ed Blassner grumbled from the up-stairs window. To him,
death and furious doctors had small novelty. While he drew
on his trousers and coat he was to be heard discoursing to his
drowsy wife on the woes of druggists and the desirability of
moving to Los Angeles and going into real estate. But he did
have diphtheria antitoxin in his shop, and sixteen minutes after
Martin's escape from being killed by a train he was speeding
to Henry Novak's.

165

VI

The child was still alive when he came brusquely into the
house.

All the way back he had seen her dead and stiff. He grunted
"Thank God!" and angrily called for hot water. He was no
longer the embarrassed cub doctor but the wise and heroic
physician who had won the Race with Death, and in the peasant
eyes of Mrs. Novak, in Henry's nervous obedience, he read his
power.

Swiftly, smoothly, he made intravenous injection of the anti-
toxin, and stood expectant.

The child's breathing did not at first vary, as she choked in
the labor of expelling her breath. There was a gurgle, a struggle
in which her face blackened, and she was still. Martin peered,
incredulous. Slowly the Novaks began to glower, shaky hands
at their lips. Slowly they knew the child was gone.

In the hospital, death had become indifferent and natural to
Martin. He had said to Angus, he had heard nurses say one to
another, quite cheerfully, "Well, fifty-seven has just passed out."
Now he raged with desire to do the impossible. She couldn't be
dead. He'd do something — All the while he was groaning, "I
should've operated — I should have." So insistent was the thought
that for a time he did not realize that Mrs. Novak was clamor-
ing, "She is dead? Dead?"

He nodded, afraid to look at the woman.

"You killed her, with that needle thing! And not even tell us,
so we could call the priest!"

He crawled past her lamentations and the man's sorrow and
drove home, empty of heart.

"I shall never practice medicine again," he reflected.

"I'm through," he said to Leora. "I'm no good. I should of
operated. I can't face people, when they know about it. I'm
through. I'll go get a lab job — Dawson Hunziker or some place."

Salutary was the tartness with which she protested, "You're
the most conceited man that ever lived! Do you think you're
the only doctor that ever lost a patient? I know you did every-
thing you could." But he went about next day torturing him-
self, the more tortured when Mr. Tozer whined at supper,

166

"Henry Novak and his woman was in town today. They sa^
you ought to have saved their girl. Why didn't you give your
mind to it and manage to cure her somehow? Ought to tried.
Kind of too bad, because the Novaks have a lot of influence «
with all these Pole and Hunky farmers."

After a night when he was too tired to sleep, Martin suddenly
drove to Leopolis.

From the Tozers he had heard almost religious praise of Dr.
Adam Winter of Leopolis, a man of nearly seventy, the pioneer
physician of Crynssen County, and to this sage he was fleeing.
As he drove he mocked furiously his melodramatic Race with
Death, and he came wearily into the dust-whirling Main Street.
Dr. Winter's office was above a grocery, in a long "block" of
bright red brick stores with an Egyptian cornice — of tin. The
darkness of the broad hallway was soothing after the prairie
heat and incandescence. Martin had to wait till three respectful
patients had been received by Dr. Winter, a hoary man with a
sympathetic bass voice, before he was admitted to the consulta-
tion-room.

The examining-chair was of doubtful superiority to that once
used by Doc Vickerson of Elk Mills, and sterilizing was appar-
ently done in a wash-bowl, but in a corner was an electric thera-
peutic cabinet with more electrodes and pads than Martin had
ever seen.

He told the story of the Novaks, and Winter cried, "Why,
Doctor, you did everything you could have and more too. Only
thing is, next time, in a crucial case, you better call some older
doctor in consultation — not that you need his advice, but it
makes a hit with the family, it divides the responsibility, and
keeps 'em from going around criticizing. I, uh, I frequently
have the honor of being called by some of my younger col-
leagues. Just wait. I'll 'phone the editor of the Gazette and give
him an item about the case."

When he had telephoned, Dr. Winter shook hands ardently.
He indicated his electric cabinet. "Got one of those things yet?
Ought to, my boy. Don't know as I use it very often, except
with the cranks that haven't anything the matter with 'em, but
say, it would surprise you how it impresses folks. Well, Doctor,
welcome to Crynssen County. Married? Won't you and your

167

wife come take dinner with us some Sunday noon ? Mrs. Winter
will be real pleased to meet you. And if I ever can be of service
to you in a consultation — I only charge a very little more than
my regular fee, and it looks so well, talking the case over with
an older man."
Driving home, Martin fell into vain and wicked boasting:
"You bet I'll stick to it! At worst, I'll never be as bad as that
snuffling old fee-splitter!"

Two weeks after, the Wheatsylvania Eagle, a smeary four-
page rag, reported:

Our enterprising contemporary, the Leopolis Gazette, had as
follows last wee\ to say of one of our townsmen who we re-
cently welcomed to our midst.

"Dr. M. Arrowsmith of Wheatsylvania is being congratulated,
we are informed by our valued pioneer local physician, Dr.
Adam Winter, by the medical fraternity all through the Pony
River Valley, there being no occupation or profession more un-
selfishly appreciative of each other's virtues than the medical
gentlemen, on the courage and enterprise he recently displayed
in addition to his scientific skill.

"Being called to attend the little daughter of Henry Norwalk
of near Delft the well-known farmer and finding the little one
near death with diphtheria he made a desperate attempt to save
it by himself bringing antitoxin from Blassner our ever popular
druggist, who had on hand a full and fresh supply. He drove out
and bac\ in his gasoline chariot, making the total distance of 48
miles in jg minutes.

"Fortunately our ever alert policeman, foe Colby, was on the
job and helped Dr. Arrowsmith find Mr. Blassner s bungalow
on Red River Avenue and this gentleman rose from bed and
hastened to supply the doctor with the needed article but un-
fortunately the child was already too low to be saved but it is by
such incidents of pluck an^ quicK thinking as well as knowledge
which make the medical profession one of our greatest bless-
ings."

Two hours after this was published, Miss Agnes Ingleblad
came in for another discussion of her non-existent ailments,
and two days later Henry Novak appeared, saying proudly:

168

"Well, Doc, we all done what we could for the poor little
girl, but I guess I waited too long calling you. The woman is
awful' cut up. She and I was reading that piece in the Eagle
about it. We showed it to the priest. Say, Doc, I wish you'd take
a look at my foot. I got kind of a rheumatic pain in the ankle."

169

CHAPTER XVI

WHEN he had practiced medicine in Wheatsylvania for
one year, Martin was an inconspicuous but not dis-
couraged country doctor. In summer Leora and he
drove to the Pony River for picnic suppers and a swim, very
noisy, splashing, and immodest; through autumn he went duck-
hunting with Bert Tozer, who became nearly tolerable when he
stood at sunset on a pass between two slews; and with winter
isolating the village in a sun-blank desert of snow, they had
sleigh-rides, card-parties, "sociables" at the churches.

When Martin's flock turned to him for help, their need and
their patient obedience made them beautiful. Once or twice he
lost his temper with jovial villagers who bountifully explained
to him that he was less aged than he might have been; once
or twice he drank too much whisky at poker parties in the back
room of the Co-operative Store; but he was known as reliable,
skillful, and honest — and on the whole he was rather less distin-
guished than Alec Ingleblad the barber, less prosperous than
Nils Krag the carpenter, and less interesting to his neighbors
than the Finnish garageman.

Then one accident and one mistake made him famous for
full twelve miles about.

He had gone fishing, in the spring. As he passed a farmhouse
a woman ran out shrieking that her baby had swallowed a
thimble and was choking to death. Martin had for surgical kit
a large jack-knife. He sharpened it on the farmer's oilstone,
sterilized it in the tea-kettle, operated on the baby's throat, and
saved its life.

Every newspaper in the Pony River Valley had a paragraph,
and before this sensation was over he cured Miss Agnes Ingle-
blad of her desire to be cured.

170

She had achieved cold hands and a slow circulation, and he
was called at midnight. He was soggily sleepy, after two coun-
try drives on muddy roads, and in his torpor he gave he/- an
overdose of strychnin, which so shocked and stimulated her that
she decided to be well. It was so violent a change that it made
her more interesting than being an invalid — people had of late
taken remarkably small pleasure in her symptoms. She went
about praising Martin, and all the world said, "I hear this Doc
Arrowsmith is the only fellow Agnes ever doctored with that's
done her a mite of good."

He gathered a practice small, sound, and in no way remark-
able. Leora and he moved from the Tozers' to a cottage of their
own, with a parlor-dining-room which displayed a nickeled stove
on bright, new, pleasant-smelling linoleum, and a golden-oak
sideboard with a souvenir match-holder from Lake Minnetonka,
He bought a small Roentgen ray outfit; and he was made a di-
rector of the Tozer bank. He became too busy to long for his
days of scientific research, which had never existed, and Leora
sighed:

"It's fierce, being married. I did expect I'd have to follow you
out on the road and be a hobo, but I never expected to be a
Pillar of the Community. Well, I'm too lazy to look up a new
husband. Only I warn you: when you become the Sunday
School superintendent, you needn't expect me to play the organ
and smile at the cute jokes you make about Willy's not learninr
his Golden Text."

ii

So did Martin stumble into respectability.

In the autumn of 1912, when Mr. Debs, Mr. Roosevelt, Ml
Wilson, and Mr. Taft were campaigning for the presidency,
when Martin Arrowsmith had lived in Wheatsylvania for a year
and a half, Bert Tozer became a Prominent Booster. He re-
turned from the state convention of the Modern Woodmen of
America with notions. Several towns had sent boosting delega-
tions to the convention, and the village of Groningen had turned
out a motor procession of five cars, each with an enormous
pennant, "Groningen for White Men and Black Dirt."

Bert came back clamoring that every motor in town must
carry a Wheatsylvania pennant. He had bought thirty of them,

171

and they were on sale at the bank at seventy-five cents apiece.
This, Bert explained to everyone who came into the bank, was
exactly cost-price, which was within eleven cents of the truth.
He came galloping at Martin, demanding that he be the first to
display a pennant.

"I don't want one of those fool things flopping from my 'bus,"
protested Martin. "What's the idea, anyway?"

"What's the idea? To advertise your own town, of course!"

"What is there to advertise? Do you think you're going to
make strangers believe Wheatsylvania is a metropolis like New
York or Jimtown by hanging a dusty rag behind a secondhand
tin Lizzie?"

"You never did have any patriotism! Let me tell you, Mart,
if you don't put on a banner I'll see to it that everybody in
town notices it!"

While the other rickety cars of the village announced to the
world, or at least to several square miles of the world, that
Wheatsylvania was the "Wonder Town of Central N. D.," Mar-
tin's clattering Ford went bare; and when his enemy Norblom
remarked, "I like to see a fellow have some public spirit and
appreciate the place he gets his money outa," the citizenry
nodded and spat, and began to question Martin's fame as a
worker of miracles.

in

He had intimates — the barber, the editor of the Eagle, the
garageman — to whom he talked comfortably of hunting and the
crops, and with whom he played poker. Perhaps he was too inti-
mate with them. It was the theory of Crynssen County that it
was quite all right for a young professional man to take a timely
drink providing he kept it secret and made up for it by yearn-
ing over the clergy of the neighborhood. But with the clergy
Martin was brief, and his drinking and poker he never con-
cealed.

If he was bored by the United Brethren minister's discourse
on doctrine, on the wickedness of movies, and the scandalous
pay of pastors, it was not at all because he was a distant and
supersensitive young man but because he found more savor in
the garageman's salty remarks on the art of remembering to
ante in poker.

172

Through all the state there were celebrated poker players,
rustic-looking men with stolid faces, men who sat in shirt-
sleeves, chewing tobacco; men whose longest remark was "By
me," and who delighted to plunder the gilded and condescend-
ing traveling salesmen. When there was news of a "big game
on," the county sports dropped in silently and went to work —
the sewing-machine agent from Leopolis, the undertaker from
Vanderheide's Grove, the bootlegger from St. Luke, the red fat
man from Melody who had no known profession.

Once (still do men tell of it gratefully, up and down the
Galley), they played for seventy-two unbroken hours, in the
office of the Wheatsylvania garage. It had been a livery-stable;
it was littered with robes and long whips, and the smell of horses
mingled with the reek of gasoline.

The players came and went, and sometimes they slept on the
floor for an hour or two, but they were never less than four in
the game. The stink of cheap feeble cigarettes and cheap power-
ful cigars hovered about the table like a malign spirit; the floor
was scattered with stubs, matches, old cards, and whisky bottles.
Among the warriors were Martin, Alec Ingleblad the barber,
and a highway engineer, all of them stripped to flannel under-
shirts, not moving for hour on hour, ruffling their cards, eyes
squinting and vacant.

When Bert Tozer heard of the afTair, he feared for the good
fame of Wheatsylvania, and to everyone he gossiped about
Martin's evil ways and his own patience. Thus it happened that
while Martin was at the height of his prosperity and credit as a
physician, along the Pony River Valley sinuated the whispers
that he was a gambler, that he was a "drinking man," that he
never went to church; and all the godly enjoyed mourning,
"Too bad to see a decent young man like that going to the
dogs."

Martin was as impatient as he was stubborn. He resented the
well-meant greetings: "You ought to leave a little hooch for the
rest of us to drink, Doc," or "I s'pose you're too busy playing
poker to drive out to the house and take a look at the woman."
He was guilty of an absurd and boyish tactlessness when he
heard Norblom observing to the postmaster, "A fellow that calls
himself a doctor just because he had luck with that fool Agnef

173

Ingleblad, he hadn't ought to go getting drunk and disgracing—''

Martin stopped. "Norblom! You talking about me?"

The storekeeper turned slowly. "I got more important things
to do 'n talk about you," he cackled.

As Martin went on he heard laughter.

He told himself that these villagers were generous; that their
snooping was in part an affectionate interest, and inevitable in a
village where the most absorbing event of the year was the
United Brethren Sunday School picnic on Fourth of July. But
he could not rid himself of twitchy discomfort at their unend-
ing and maddeningly detailed comments on everything. He felt
as though the lightest word he said in his consultation-room
would be megaphoned from flapping ear to ear all down the
country roads.

He was contented enough in gossiping about fishing with the
barber, nor was he condescending to meteorologicomania, but
except for Leora he had no one with whom he could talk of his
work. Angus Duer had been cold, but Angus had his teeth into
every change of surgical technique, and he was an acrid debater.
Martin saw that, unless he struggled, not only would he harden
into timid morality under the pressure of the village, but be
fixed in a routine of prescriptions and bandaging.

He might find a stimulant in Dr. Hesselink of Groningen.

He had seen Hesselink only once, but everywhere he heard
of him as the most honest practitioner in the Valley. On impulse
Martin drove down to call on him.

Dr. Hesselink was a man of forty, ruddy, tall, broad-shoul-
dered. You knew immediately that he was careful and that he
was afraid of nothing, however much he might lack in imagina-
tion. He received Martin with no vast ebullience, and his stare
said, "Well, what do you want? I'm a busy man."

"Doctor," Martin chattered, "do you find it hard to keep up
with medical developments?"

"No. Read the medical journals."

"Well, don't you — gosh, I don't want to get sentimental about
it, but don't you find that without contact with the Big Guns
you get mentally lazy — sort of lacking in inspiration?"

"I do not! There's enough inspiration for me in trying to help
the sick."

*74

To himself Martin was protesting, "All right, if you don't
want to be friendly, go to the devil!" But he tried again:

"I know. But for the game of the thing, for the pleasure of
increasing medical knowledge, how can you keep up if you
don't have anything but routine practice among a lot of farm'
ers?"

"Arrowsmith, I may do you an injustice, but there's a lot of
you young practitioners who feel superior to the farmers, that
are doing their own jobs better than you are. You think that if
you were only in the city with libraries and medical meetings
and everything, you'd develop. Well, I don't know of anything
to prevent your studying at home! You consider yourself so
much better educated than these rustics, but I notice you say
'gosh' and 'Big Guns' and that sort of thing. How much do you
read? Personally, I'm extremely well satisfied. My people pay
me an excellent living wage, they appreciate my work, and they
honor me by election to the schoolboard. I find that a good
many of these farmers think a lot harder and squarer than the
swells I meet in the city. Well! I don't see any reason for feeling
superior, or lonely either!"

"Hell, I don't!" Martin mumbled. As he drove back he raged
at Hesselink's superiority about not feeling superior, but he
stumbled into uncomfortable meditation. It was true; he was
half-educated. He was supposed to be a college graduate but
he knew nothing of economics, nothing of history, nothing of
music or painting. Except in hasty bolting for examinations he
had read no poetry save that of Robert Service, and the only
prose besides medical journalism at which he looked nowadays
was the baseball and murder news in the Minneapolis papers
and Wild West stories in the magazines.

He reviewed the "intelligent conversation" which, in the desert
of Wheatsylvania, he believed himself to have conducted at
Mohalis. He remembered that to Clif Clawson it had been pre-
tentious to use any phrase which was not as colloquial and as
smutty as the speech of a truck-driver, and that his own dis-
course had differed from Clif's largely in that it had been less
fantastic and less original. He could recall nothing save the
philosophy of Max Gottlieb, occasional scoldings of Angus Duerf
one out of ten among Madeline Fox's digressions, £nd tht coun

175

cils of Dad Silva which was above the level of Alec Ingleblad's
barber-shop.

He came home hating Hesselink but by no means loving
himself; he fell upon Leora and, to her placid agreement, an-
nounced that they were "going to get educated, if it kills us."
He went at it as he had gone at bacteriology.

He read European history aloud at Leora, who looked inter-
ested or at least forgiving; he worried the sentences »n a copy
of "The Golden Bowl" which an unfortunate school-teacher had
left at the Tozers'; he borrowed a volume of Conrad from the
village editor and afterward, as he drove the prairie roads, he
was marching into jungle villages — sun helmets, orchids, lost
temples of obscene and dog-faced deities, secret and sun-scarred
rivers. He was conscious of his own mean vocabulary. It cannot
be said that he became immediately and conspicuously articulate,
yet it is possible that in those long- intense evenings of reading
with Leora he advanced a step or two toward the tragic enchant-
ments of Max Gottlieb's world — enchanting sometimes and tragic
always.

But in becoming a schoolboy again he was not so satisfied as
Dr. Hesselink.

IV

Gustaf Sondelius was back in America.

In medical school, Martin had read of Sondelius, the soldier
of science. He held reasonable and lengthy degrees, but he was
a rich man and eccentric, and neither toiled in laboratories nor
had a decent office and a home and a lacy wife. He roamed the
world fighting epidemics and founding institutions and making
inconvenient speeches and trying new drinks. He was a Swede
by birth, a German by education, a little of everything by speech,
and his clubs were in London, Paris, Washington, and New
York. He had been heard of from Batoum and Fuchau, from
Milan and Bechuanaland, from Antofagasta and Cape Roman-
zoff. Manson on Tropical Diseases mentions Sondelius's admi-
rable method of killing rats with hydrocyanic acid gas, and The
Sketch once mentioned his atrocious system in baccarat.

Gustaf Sondelius shouted, in high places and low, that most
diseases could be and must be wiped out; that tuberculosis,
cancer, typhoid, the plague, influenza, were an invading army

176

against which the world must mobilize — literally; that public
health authorities must supersede generals and oil kings. He
was lecturing through America, and his exclamatory assertions
were syndicated in the press.

Martin snifled at most newspaper articles touching on science
or health but Sondelius's violence caught him, and suddenly he
was converted, and it was an important thing for him, that
conversion.

He told himself that however much he might relieve the sick,
essentially he was a business man, in rivalry with Dr. Winter of
Leopolis and Dr. Hesselink of Groningen; that though they
might be honest, honesty and healing were less their purpose
than making money; that to get rid of avoidable disease and
produce a healthy population would be the worst thing in the
world for them; and that they must all be replaced by public
health officials.

Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man. Since
the death of his Gottlieb-cult he had unconsciously sought a new
passion, and he found it now in Gustaf Sondelius's war on dis-
ease. Immediately he became as annoying to his patients as he
had once been to Digamma Pi.

He informed the farmers at Delft that they had no right to
have so much tuberculosis.

This was infuriating, because none of their rights as American
citizens was better established, or more often used, than the
privilege of being ill. They fumed, "Who does he think he is?
We call him in for doctoring, not for bossing. Why, the damn'
fool said we ought to burn down our houses — said we were
committing a crime if we had the con. here! Won't stand for
nobody talking to me like that!"

Everything became clear to Martin — too clear. The nation
must make the best physicians autocratic officials, at once, and
that was all there was to it. As to how the officials were to
become perfect executives, and how people were to be persuaded
to obey them, he had no suggestions but only a beautiful faith.
At breakfast he scolded, "Another idiotic day of writing pre-
scriptions for bellyaches that ought never to have happened!
If I could only get into the Big Fight, along with men like
Sondelius! It makes me tired!"

177

Leora murmured, "Yes, darling. I'll promise to be good. I
won't have any little bellyaches or T.B. or anything, so please
don't lecture me!"

Even in his irritability he was gentle, for Leora was with
child.

Their baby was coming in five months. Martin promised to
it everything he had missed.

"He's going to have a real education!" he gloated, as they sat
on the porch in spring twilight. "He'll learn all this literature
and stuff. We haven't done much ourselves — here we are, stuck
in this two-by-twice crossroads for the rest of our lives — but
maybe we've gone a little beyond our dads, and he'll go way
beyond us."

He was worried, for all his flamboyance. Leora had undue
morning sickness. Till noon she dragged about the house, pea-
green and tousled and hollow-faced. He found a sort of maid,
and came home to help, to wipe the dishes and sweep the front
walk. All evening he read to her, not history now and Henry
James but "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch," which both of
them esteemed a very fine tale. He sat on the floor by the grubby
second-hand couch on which she lay in her weakness; he held
her hand and crowed:

"Golly, we — No, not 'golly.' Well, what can you say except
'golly'? Anyway: Some day we'll save up enough money for a
couple months in Italy and all those places. All those old narrow
streets and old castles! There must be scads of 'em that are
couple hundred years old or older! And we'll take the boy . . .
Even if he turns out to be a girl, darn him! . . . And he'll learn
to chatter Wop and French and everything like a regular native,
and his dad and mother'll be so proud! Oh, we'll be a fierce pair
of old birds! We never did have any more morals 'n a rabbit,
either of us, and probably when we're seventy we'll sit out on
the doorstep and smoke pipes and snicker at all the respectable
people going by, and tell each other scandalous stories about 'em
till they want to take a shot at us, and our boy — he'll wear a
plug hat and have a chauffeur — he won't dare to recognize us!"

Trained now to the false cheerfulness of the doctor, he shouted,

178

when she was racked and ghastly with the indignity of morning
sickness, "There, that's fine, old girl! Wouldn't be making a
good baby if you weren't sick. Everybody is." He was lying,
and he was nervous. Whenever he thought of her dying, he
seemed to die with her. Barren of her companionship, there
would be nothing he wanted to do, nowhere to go. What would
be the worth of having all the world if he could not show it to
her, if she was not there —

He denounced Nature for her way of tricking human beings,
by every gay device of moonlight and white limbs and reaching
loneliness, into having babies, then making birth as cruel and
clumsy and wasteful as she could. He was abrupt and jerky with
patients who called him into the country. With their suffering
he was sympathetic as he had never been, for his eyes had
opened to the terrible beauty of pain, but he must not go far
from Leora's need.

Her morning sickness turned into pernicious vomiting. Sud-
denly, while she was torn and inhuman with agony, he sent for
Dr. Hesselink, and that horrible afternoon when the prairie
spring was exuberant outside the windows of the poor iodoform-
reeking room, they took the baby from her, dead.

Had it been possible, he might have understood Hesselink's
success then, have noted that gravity and charm, that pity and
sureness, which made people entrust their lives to him. Not cold
and blaming was Hesselink now, but an older and wiser brother,
very compassionate. Martin saw nothing. He was not a physician.
He was a terrified boy, less useful to Hesselink than the dullest
nurse.

When he was certain that Leora would recover, Martin sat by
her bed, coaxing, "We'll just have to make up our minds we
never can have a baby now, and so I want — Oh, I'm no good!
And I've got a rotten temper. But to you, I want to be every-
thing!"

She whispered, scarce to be heard:

"He would have been such a sweet baby. Oh, I know! I saw
him so often. Because I knew he was going to be like you, when
you were a baby." She tried to laugh. "Perhaps I wanted him
because I could boss him. I've never had anybody that would
let me boss him. So if I can't have a real baby, I'll have to bring

179

you up. Make you a great man that everybody will wonder at,
like your Sondelius. . . . Darling, I worried so about your wor-
rying— "

He kissed her, and for hours they sat together, unspeaking,
eternally understanding, in the prairie twilight.

180

CHAPTER XVII

DR. COUGHLIN of Leopolis had a red mustache, a large
heartiness, and a Maxwell which, though it was three
years old this May and deplorable as to varnish, he
believed to be the superior in speed and beauty of any motor in
Dakota.

He came home in high cheerfulness, rode the youngest of his
three children pickaback, and remarked to his wife:

"Tessie, I got a swell idea."

"Yes, and you got a swell breath, too. I wish you'd quit testing
that old Spirits Frumentus bottle at the drug store!"

" 'At a girl! But honest, listen!"

"I will not!" She bussed him heartily. "Nothing doing about
driving to Los Angeles this summer. Too far, with all the brats
squalling."

"Sure. All right. But I mean: Let's pack up and light out
and spend a week touring 'round the state. Say tomorrow or
next day. Got nothing to keep me now except that obstetrical
case, and we'll hand that over to Winter."

"All right. We can try out the new thermos bottles!"

Dr. Coughlin, his lady, and the children started at four in the
morning. The car was at first too well arranged to be interest-
ing, but after three days, as he approached you on the flat road
that without an inch of curving was slashed for leagues through
the grassy young wheat, you saw the doctor in his khaki suit,
his horn-rimmed spectacles, and white linen boating hat; his
wife in a green flannel blouse and a lace boudoir cap. The rest
of the car was slightly confused. While you motored by you
noticed a canvas Egyptian Water Bottle, mud on wheels and
fenders, a spade, two older children leaning perilously out and
making tongues at yoii, the baby's diapers hanging on a line

181

across the tonneau, a torn copy of Snappy Stories, seven lolly-
pop sticks, a jack, a fish-rod, and a rolled tent.

Your last impression was of two large pennants labeled "Le-
Dpolis, N. D.," and "Excuse Our Dust."

The Coughlins had agreeable adventures. Once they were
stuck in a mud-hole. To the shrieking admiration of the family,
the doctor got them out by making a bridge of fence rails. Once
the ignition ceased and, while they awaited a garageman sum-
moned by telephone, they viewed a dairy farm with an electrical
milking machine. All the way they were broadened by travel,
and discovered the wonders of the great world: the movie thea-
ter at Roundup, which had for orchestra not only a hand-played
piano but also a violin; the black fox farm at Melody; and the
Severance water-tower, which was said to be the tallest in Cen-
tral North Dakota.

Dr. Coughlin "dropped in to pass the time of day," as he
said, with all the doctors. At St. Luke he had an intimate friend
in Dr. Tromp — at least they had met twice, at the annual meet-
ings of the Pony River Valley Medical Association. When he
told Tromp how bad they had found the hotels, Tromp looked
uneasy and conscientious, and sighed, "If the wife could fix it
up somehow, I'd like to invite you all to stay with us tonight."

"Oh, don't want to impose on you. Sure it wouldn't be any
trouble?" said Coughlin.

After Mrs. Tromp had recovered from her desire to call her
husband aside and make unheard but vigorous observations, and
after the oldest Tromp boy had learned that "it wasn't nice for
a little gentleman to kick his wee guests that came from so
far, far away," they were all very happy. Mrs. Coughlin and
Mrs. Tromp bewailed the cost of laundry soap and butter, and
exchanged recipes for pickled peaches, while the men, sitting on
the edge of the porch, their knees crossed, eloquently waving
their cigars, gave themselves up to the ecstasy of shop-talk:

"Say, Doctor, how do you find collections?"

(It was Coughlin speaking — or it might have been Tromp.)

"Well, they're pretty good. These Germans pay up first rate.
Never send 'em a bill, but when they've harvested they come
in and say, 'How much do I owe you, Doctor?'"

"Yuh, the Germans are pretty good pay."

182

"Yump, they certainly are. Not many dead-beats among the
Germans."

"Yes, that's a fact. Say, tell me, Doctor, what do you do with
your jaundice cases?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Doctor: if it's a persistent case I usually
give ammonium chlorid."

"Do you? I've been giving ammonium chlorid but here the
other day I see a communication in the Journal of the AMji.
where a fellow was claiming it wasn't any good."

"Is that a fact! Well, well! I didn't see that. Hum. Well. Say,
Doctor, do you find you can do much with asthma?"

"Well now, Doctor, just in confidence, I'm going to tell you
something that may strike you as funny, but I believe that foxes'
lungs are fine for asthma, and T.B. too. I told that to a Sioux
City pulmonary specialist one time and he laughed at me — said
it wasn't scientific — and I said to him, 'Hell!' I said, 'scientific!'
I said, 'I don't know if it's the latest fad and wrinkle in science
or not,' I said, 'but I get results, and that's what I'm looking for
's results!' I said. I tell you a plug G.P. may not have a lot of
letters after his name, but he sees a slew of mysterious things
that he can't explain, and I swear I believe most of these damn'
alleged scientists could learn a whale of a lot from the plain
country practitioners, let me tell you!"

"Yun, that's a fact. Personally I'd rather stay right here in the
country and be able to do a little hunting and take it easy than
be the classiest specialist in the cities. One time I kind of figured
on becoming an X-ray specialist— place in New York where you
can take the whole course in eight weeks — and maybe settling
in Butte or Sioux Falls, but I figured that even if I got to mak-
ing eight-ten thousand a year, Wouldn't hardly mean more than
three thousand does here and so — And a fellow has to consider
his duty to his old patients."

"That's so. . . . Say, Doctor, say, what sort of fellow is Mc
Minturn, down your way?"

"Well, I don't like to knock any fellow practitioner, and I
suppose he's well intentioned, but just between you and me he
does too confounded much guesswork. Now you take you and
me, we apply science to a case, instead of taking a chance and
just relying on experience and going off half-cocked. But Mo
Minturn, he doesn't know enough. And say, that wife of his,

183

she's a caution — she's got the meanest tongue in four counties,
and the way she chases around drumming up business for Mac —
Well, I suppose that's their way of doing business."

"Is old Winter keeping going?"

"Oh, yes, in a sort of way. You know how he is. Of course
he's about twenty years behind the times, but he's a great hand-
holder — keep some fool woman in bed six weeks longer than
he needs to, and call around twice a day and chin with her —
absolutely unnecessary."

"I suppose you get your biggest competition from Silzer,
Doctor?"

"Don't you believe it, Doctor! He isn't beginning to do the
practice he lets on to. Trouble with Silzer is, he's too brash —
shoots off his mouth too much — likes to hear himself talk. Oh,
say, by the way, have you run into this new fellow — will been
located here about two years now — at Wheatsylvania — Arrow-
smith?"

"No, but they say he's a good bright young fellow."

"Yes, they claim he's a brainy man — very well-informed — and
I hear his wife is a nice brainy little woman."

"I hear Arrowsmith hits it up too much though — likes his
booze awful' well."

"Yes, so they say. Shame, for a nice hustling young fellow.
I like a nip myself, now and then, but a Drinking Man — ! Sup-
pose he's drunk and gets called out on a case! And a fellow
from down there was telling me Arrowsmith is great on books
and study, but he's a freethinker — never goes to church."

"Is that a fact! Hm. Great mistake for any doctor to not
identify himself with some good solid religious denomination,
whether he believes the stuff or not. I tell you a priest or a
preacher can send you an awful lot of business."

"You bet he can! Well, this fellow said Arrowsmith was
always arguing with the preachers — he told some Reverend that
everybody ought to read this immunologist Max Gottlieb, and
this Jacques Loeb — you know — the fellow that, well, I don't recall
just exactly what it was, but he claimed he could create living
fishes out of chemicals."

"Sure! There you got it! That's the kind of delusions these
laboratory fellows get unless they have some practical practice

184

to keep 'em well balanced. Well, if Arrowsmith falls for that
kind of fellow, no wonder people don't trust him."

"That's so. Hm. Well, it's too bad Arrowsmith goes drinking
and helling around and neglecting his family and his patients.
I can see his finish. Shame. Well — wonder what time o' night
it's getting to be?"

ii

Bert Tozer wailed, "Mart, what you been doing to Dr. Cough-
iin of Leopolis? Fellow told me he was going around saying
/ou were a booze-hoister and so on."

"Did he ? People do sort of keep an eye on one another around
here, don't they?"

"You bet your life they do, and that's why I tell you you
ought to cut out the poker and the booze. You don't see me
needing any liquor, do you?"

Martin more desperately than ever felt the whole county
watching him. He was not a praise-eater; he was not proud
that he should feel misplaced; but however sturdily he struggled
he saw himself outside the picture of Wheatsylvania and trudg-
ing years of country practice.

Suddenly, without planning it, forgetting in his admiration
for Sondelius and the health war his pride of the laboratory,
he was thrown into a research problem.

in

There was blackleg among the cattle in Crynssen County.
The state veterinarian had been called and Dawson Hunziker
vaccine had been injected, but the disease spread. Martin heard
the farmers wailing. He noted that the injected cattle showed
no inflammation nor rise in temperature. He was roused by a
suspicion that the Hunziker vaccine had insufficient living or-
ganisms, and he went yelping on the trail of his hypothesis.

He obtained (by misrepresentations) a supply of the vaccine
and tested it in his stuffy closet of a laboratory. He had to work
out his own device for growing anaerobic cultures, but he had
been trained by the Gottlieb who remarked, "Any man dat iss
unable to build a filter out of toot'-picks, if he has to, would
maybe better buy his results along with his fine equipment."

185

Out of a la'-ge fruit-jar and a soldered pipe Martin made his
apparatus.

When he was altogether sure that the vaccine did not contain
living blackleg organisms, he was much more delighted than if
he had found that good Mr. Dawson Hunziker was producing
honest vaccine.

With no excuse and less encouragement he isolated blackleg
organisms from sick cattle and prepared an attenuated vaccine
of his own. It took much time. He did not neglect his patients
but certainly he failed to appear in the stores, at the poker
games. Leora and he dined on a sandwich every evening and
hastened to the laboratory, to heat the cultures in the impro-
vised water-bath, an ancient and leaky oatmeal-cooker with an
alcohol lamp. The Martin who had been impatient of Hesselink
was of endless patience as he watched his results. He whistled
and hummed, and the hours from seven to midnight were a
moment. Leora, frowning placidly, the tip of her tongue at the
corner of her mouth, guarded the temperature like a good little
watchdog.

After three efforts with two absurd failures, he had a vaccine
which satisfied him, and he injected a stricken herd. The black-
leg stopped, which was for Martin the end and the reward, and
he turned his notes and supply of vaccine over to the state
veterinarian. For others, it was not the end. The veterinarian
of the county denounced him for intruding on their right to
save or kill cattle; the physicians hinted, "That's the kind of
monkey-business that ruins the dignity of the profession. I tell
you Arrowsmith's a medical nihilist and a notoriety-seeker,
that's what he is. You mark my words, instead of his sticking
to decent regular practice, you'll be hearing of his opening a
quack sanitarium, one of these days!"

He commented to Leora:

"Dignity, hell! If I had my way I'd be doing research — oh, not
chis cold detached stuff of Gottlieb but really practical work —
and then I'd have some fellow like Sondelius take my results
and jam 'em down people's throats, and I'd make them and their
cattle and their tabby-cats healthy whether they wanted to be or
not, that's what I'd do!"

In this mood he read in his Minneapolis paper, between a
half column on the marriage of the light middleweight cham-

186

pion and three lines devoted to the lynching of an I.W.W. agi-
tator, the announcement:

Gustave Sundelios, well-\nown authority on cholera preven-
tion, will give an address on "Heroes of Health" at the Univer-
sity summer school next Friday evening.

He ran into the house gloating, "Lee! Sondelius going to lec-
ture in Minneapolis. I'm going! Come on! We'll hear him and
have a bat and everything!"

"No, you run down by yourself. Be fine for you to get away
from the town and the family and me for a while. I'll go down
with you in the fall. Honestly. If I'm not in the way, maybe
you can manage to have a good long talk with Dr. Sondelius."

"Fat chance! The big city physicians and the state health
authorities will be standing around him ten deep. But I'm
going."

rv

The prairie was hot, the wheat rattled in a weary breeze, the
day-coach was gritty with cinders. Martin was cramped by the
hours of slow riding. He drowsed and smoked and meditated.
"I'm going to forget medicine and everything else," he vowed.
"I'll go up and talk to somebody in the smoker and tell him
I'm a shoe-salesman."

He did. Unfortunately his confidant happened to be a real
shoe-salesman, with a large curiosity as to what firm Martin
represented, and he returned to the day coach with a renewed
sense of injury. When he reached Minneapolis, in mid-afternoon,
he hastened to the University and besought a ticket to the
Sondelius lecture before he had even found a hotel, though not
before he had found the long glass of beer which he had been
picturing for a hundred miles.

He had an informal but agreeable notion of spending his first
evening of freedom in dissipation. Somewhere he would meet
a company of worthies who would succor him with laughter
and talk and many drinks — not too many drinks, of course — and
motor very rapidly to Lake Minnetonka for a moonlight swim.
He began his search for the brethren by having a cocktail at a
hotel bar and dinner in a Hennepin Avenue restaurant. Nobody

187

looked at him, nobody seemed to desire a companion. He was
lonely for Leora, and all his state of grace, all his earnest and
simple-hearted devotion to carousal, degenerated into sleepiness.
As he turned and turned in his hotel bed he lamented, "And
probably the Sondelius lecture will be rotten. Probably he's sim-
ply another Roscoe Geake."

In the hot night desultory students wandered up to the door
of the lecture-hall, scanned the modest Sondelius poster, and
ambled away. Martin was half minded to desert with them, and
he went in sulkily. The hall was a third full of summer students
and teachers, and men who might have been doctors or school-
principals. He sat at the back, fanning with his straw hat, dis-
liking the man with side-whiskers who shared the row with
him, disapproving of Gustaf Sondelius, and as to himself having
no good opinions whatever.

Then the room was charged with vitality. Down the central
aisle, ineffectively attended by a small fussy person, thundered
a man with a smile, a broad brow, and a strawpile of curly
flaxen hair — a Newfoundland dog of a man. Martin sat straight.
He was strengthened to endure even the depressing man with
side-whiskers as Sondelius launched out, in a musical bellow
with Swedish pronunciation and Swedish singsong:

"The medical profession can have but one desire: to destroy
the medical profession. As for the laymen, they can be sure of
but one thing: nine-tenths of what they know about health is
not so, and with the other tenth they do nothing. As Butler
shows in 'Erewhon' — the swine stole that idea from me, too,
maybe thirty years before I ever got it — the only crime for w'ich
we should hang people is having toobercoolosis."

"Umph!" grunted the studious audience, doubtful whether it
was fitting to be amused, offended, bored, or edified.

Sondelius was a roarer and a playboy, but he knew incanta-
tions. With him Martin watched the heroes of yellow fever,
Reed, Agramonte, Carroll, and Lazear; with him he landed in
a Mexican port stilled with the plague and famished beneath
the virulent sun; with him rode up the mountain trails to a hill
town rotted with typhus; with him, in crawling August, when

188

babies were parched skeletons, fought an ice trust beneath the
gilt and blunted sword of the law.

"That's what I want to do! Not just tinker at a lot of worn-
out bodies but make a new world!" Martin hungered. "Gosh,
I'd follow him through fire! And the way he lays out the crape-
hangers that criticize public health results! If I could only man-
age to meet him and talk to him for a couple o' minutes — "

He lingered after the lecture. A dozen people surrounded
Sondelius on the platform; a few shook hands; a few asked
questions; a doctor worried, "But how about the danger of free
clinics and all those things drifting into socialism?" Martin
stood back till Sondelius had been deserted. A janitor was clos-
ing the windows, very firmly and suggestively. Sondelius looked
about, and Martin would have sworn that the Great Man was
lonely. He shook hands with him, and quaked:

"Sir, if you aren't due some place, I wonder if you'd like to
come out and have a — a — "

Sondelius loomed over him in solar radiance and rumbled,
"Have a drink? Well, I think maybe I would. How did the
joke about the dog and his fleas go tonight? Do you think they
liked it?"

"Oh, sure, you bet."

The warrior who had been telling of feeding five thousand
Tatars, of receiving a degree from a Chinese university and
refusing a decoration from quite a good Balkan king, looked
affectionately on his band of one disciple and demanded, "Was
it all right — was it ? Did they like it ? So hot tonight, and I been
lecturing nine time a week — Des Moines, Fort Dodge, LaCrosse,
Elgin, Joliet [but he pronounced it Zho-lee-ay] and — I forget.
Was it all right? Did they like it?"

"Simply corking! Oh, they just ate it up! Honestly, I've never
enjoyed anything so much in my life!"

The prophet crowed, "Come! I buy a drink. As a hygienist,
I war on alcohol. In excessive quantities it is almost as bad as
coffee or even ice cream soda. But as one who is fond of talking,
I find a nice long whisky and soda a great solvent of human
idiocy. Is there a cool place with some Pilsener here in Detroit-
no; where am I tonight? — Minneapolis?"

"I understand there's a good beer-garden. And we can get the
trolley right near here."

189

Sondelius stared at him. "Oh, I have a taxi waiting."

Martin was abashed by this luxury. In the taxi-cab he tried
to think of the proper things to say to a celebrity.

"Tell me, Doctor, do they have city health boards in Europe?"

Sondelius ignored him. "Did you see that girl going by? What
ankles! What shoulders! Is it good beer at the beer-garden?
Have they any decent cognac? Do you know Courvoisier 1865
cognac? Oof! Lecturing! I swear I will give it up. And wearing
dress clothes a night like this! You know, I mean all the crazy
things I say in my lectures, but let us now forget being earnest,
let us drink, let us sing 'Der Graf von Luxemburg,' let us de-
tach exquisite girls from their escorts, let us discuss the joys of
'Die Meistersinger,' which only I appreciate!"

In the beer-garden the tremendous Sondelius discoursed of the
Cosmos Club, Halle's investigation of infant mortality, the suita-
bility of combining benedictine and apple-jack, Biarritz, Lord
Haldane, the Doane-Buckley method of milk examination,
George Gissing, and homard thermidor. Martin looked for a
connection between Sondelius and himself, as one does with
the notorious or with people met abroad. He might have said,
"I think I met a man who knows you," or "I have had the
pleasure of reading all your articles," but he fished with "Did
you ever run into the two big men in my medical school — Win-
nemac — Dean Silva and Max Gottlieb?"

"Silva? I don't remember. But Gottlieb — you know him?
Oh!" Sondelius waved his mighty arms. "The greatest! The
spirit of science! I had the pleasure to talk with him at McGurk.
He would not sit here bawling like me! He makes me like a
circus clown! He takes all my statements about epidemiology
and shows me I am a fool! Ho, ho, ho!" He beamed, and was
off" on a denunciation of high tariff.

Each topic had its suitable refreshment. Sondelius was a fan-
tastic drinker, and zinc-lined. He mixed Pilsener, whisky, black
coffee, and a liquid which the waiter asserted to be absinthe. "I
should go to bed at midnight," he lamented, "but it is a cardinal
sin to interrupt good talk. Yoost tempt me a little! I am an easy
one to be tempted! But I must have five hours' sleep. Absolute!
I lecture in — it's some place in Iowa — tomorrow evening. Now
^hat I am past fifty, I cannot get along with three hours as I

190

used to, and yet I have found so many new things that I want
to talk about."

He was more eloquent than ever; then he was annoyed. A
surly-looking man at the next table listened and peered, and
laughed at them. Sondelius dropped from Haffkine's cholera
serum to an irate:

"If that fellow stares at me some more, I am going over and
kill him! I am a peaceful man, now that I am not so young, but
I do not like starers. I will go and argue with him. I will yoost
hit him a little!"

While the waiters came rushing, Sondelius charged the man,
threatened him with enormous fists, then stopped, shook hands
repeatedly, and brought him back to Martin.

"This is a born countryman of mine, from Gottenborg. He is
a carpenter. Sit down, Nilsson, sit down and have a drink.
Herumph! vAi-ter!"

The carpenter was a socialist, a Swedish Seventh Day Ad-
ventist, a ferocious arguer, and fond of drinking aquavit. He
denounced Sondelius as an aristocrat, he denounced Martin for
his ignorance of economics, he denounced the waiter concerning
the brandy; Sondelius and Martin and the waiter answered with
vigor; and the conversation became admirable. Presently they
were turned out of the beer-garden and the three of them
crowded into the still waiting taxicab, which shook to their
debating. Where they went, Martin could never trace. He may
have dreamed the whole tale. Once they were apparently in a
roadhouse on a long street which must have been University
Avenue; once in a saloon on Washington Avenue South, where
three tramps were sleeping at the end of the bar; once in the
carpenter's house, where an unexplained man made coffee for
them.

Wherever they might be, they were at the same time in Mos-
cow and Curacao and Murwillumbah. The carpenter created
communistic states, while Sondelius, proclaiming that he did not
care whether he worked under socialism or an emperor so long
as he could bully people into being well, annihilated tubercu-
losis and by dawn had cancer fleeing.

They parted at four, tearfully swearing to meet again, in Min-
nesota or Stockholm, in Rio or on the southern seas, and Martin

191

started for Wheatsylvania to put an end to all this nonsense of
allowing people to be ill.

And the great god Sondelius had slain Dean Silva, as Silva
had slain Gottlieb, Gottlieb had slain "Encore" Edwards the
playful chemist, Edwards had slain Doc Vickerson, and Vicker-
son had slain the minister's son who had a real trapeze in his
barn.

192

CHAPTER XVIII

DR. WOESTIJNE of Vanderheide's Grove acted in spare
time as Superintendent of Health for Crynssen County,
but the office was not well paid and it did not greatly
interest him. When Martin burst in and offered to do all the
work for half the pay, Woestijne accepted with benevolence,
assuring him that it would have a great effect on his private
practice.

It did. It almost ruined his private practice.

There was never an official appointment. Martin signed
Woestijne's name (spelling it in various interesting ways, de-
pending on how he felt) to papers, and the Board of County
Commissioners recognized Martin's limited power, but the
whole thing was probably illegal.

There was small science and considerably less heroism in his
first furies as a health officer, but a great deal of irritation for
his fellow-townsmen. He poked into yards, he denounced Mrs.
Beeson for her reeking ash-barrels, Mr. Norblom for piling
manure on the street, and the schoolboard for the school ventila-
tion and lack of instruction in tooth-brushing. The citizens had
formerly been agitated by his irreligion, his moral looseness, and
his lack of local patriotism, but when they were prodded out of
their comfortable and probably beneficial dirt, they exploded.

Martin was honest and appallingly earnest, but if he had the
innocence of the dove he lacked the wisdom of the serpent. He
did not make them understand his mission; he scarce tried to
make them understand. His authority, as Woestijne's alter ego,
was imposing on paper but feeble in action, and it was worthless
against the stubbornness which he aroused.

He advanced from garbage-spying to a drama of infection.

The community at Delft had a typhoid epidemic which slack-

193

ened and continually reappeared. The villagers believed that it
came from a tribe of squatters six miles up the creek, and they
considered lynching the offenders, as a practical protest and an
interesting break in wheat-farming. When Martin insisted that
in six miles the creek would purify any waste and that the
squatters were probably not the cause, he was amply denounced.

"He's a fine one, he is, to go around blatting that we'd ought
to have more health precautions! Here we go and show him
where there's some hellhounds that ought to be shot, and them
only Bohunks anyway, and he doesn't do a darn' thing but shoot
a lot of hot air about germicidal effect or whatever the fool thing
is," remarked Kaes, the wheat-buyer at the Delft elevator.

Flashing through the county, not neglecting but certainly not
enlarging his own practice, Martin mapped every recent case of
typhoid within five miles of Delft. He looked into milk-routes
and grocery deliveries. He discovered that most of the cases had
appeared after the visits of an itinerant seamstress, a spinster
virtuous and almost painfully hygienic. She had had typhoid
*our years before.

"She's a chronic carrier of the bugs. She's got to be examined,"
he announced.

He found her sewing at the house of an old farmer-preacher.

With modest indignation she refused to be examined, and as
he went away she could be heard weeping at the insult, while
the preacher cursed him from the doorstep. He returned with
the township police officer and had the seamstress arrested and
confined in the segregation ward of the county poor-farm. In
her discharges he found billions of typhoid bacilli.

The frail and decent body was not comfortable in the board-
lined whitewashed ward. She was shamed and frightened. She
had always been well beloved, a gentle, shabby, bright-eyed
spinster who brought presents to the babies, helped the over-
worked farmwives to cook dinner, and sang to the children in
her thin sparrow voice. Martin was reviled for persecuting her.
"He wouldn't dare pick on her if she wasn't so poor," they said,
and they talked of a jail-delivery.

Martin fretted. He called upon the seamstress at the poor-
farm, he tried to make her understand that there was no other
place for her, he brought her magazines and sweets. But he was
firm. She could not go free. He was convinced that she had

194

caused at least one hundred cases of typhoid, with nine deaths.

The county derided him. Cause typhoid now, when she had
been well for four years? The County Commissioners and the
County Board of Health called Dr. Hesselink in from the next
county. He agreed with Martin and his maps. Every meeting of
the Commissioners was a battle now, and it was uncertain
whether Martin would be ruined or throned.

Leora saved him and the seamstress. "Why not take up a
collection to send her off to some big hospital where she can
be treated, or where they can keep her if she can't be cured?"
said she.

The seamstress entered a sanitarium — and was amiably for-
gotten by everybody for the rest of her life — and his recent
enemies said of Martin, "He's mighty smart, and right on the
job." Hesselink drove over to inform him, "You did pretty well
this time, Arrowsmith. Glad to see you're settling down to
business."

Martin was slightly cocky, and immediately bounded after a
fine new epidemic. He was so fortunate as to have a case of
small-pox and several which he suspected. Some of these lay
across the border in Mencken County, Hesselink's domain, and
Hesselink laughed at him. "It's probably all chicken-pox, except
your one case. Mighty rarely you get small-pox in summer," he
chuckled, while Martin raged up and down the two counties,
proclaiming the scourge, imploring everyone to be vaccinated,
thundering, "There's going to be all hell let loose here in ten or
fifteen days!"

But the United Brethren parson, who served chapels in Wheat-
sylvania and two other villages, was an anti-vaccinationist and
he preached against it. The villages sided with him. Martin went
from house to house, beseeching them, offering to treat them
without charge. As he had never taught them to love him and
follow him as a leader, they questioned, they argued long and
easily on doorsteps, they cackled that he was drunk. Though for
weeks his strongest draft had been the acrid cofTee of the coun-
tryside, they peeped one to another that he was drunk every
night, that the United Brethren minister was about to expose
him from the pulpit.

And ten dreadful days went by and fifteen, and all but the

195

first case did prove to be chicken-pox. Hesselink gloated and the
village roared and Martin was the butt of the land.

He had only a little resented their gossip about his wicked-
ness, only in evenings of slow depression had he meditated upon
fleeing from them, but at their laughter he was black furious.

Leora comforted him with cool hands. "It'll pass over," she
said. But it did not pass.

By autumn it had become such a burlesque epic as peasants
love through all the world. He had, they mirthfully related,
declared that anybody who kept hogs would die of small-pox;
he had been drunk for a week, and diagnosed everything from
gall-stones to heart-burn as small-pox. They greeted him, with
no meaning of offense in their snickering, "Got a pimple on my
chin, Doc. What is 't — small-pox?"

More terrible than their rage is the people's laughter, and if
it rends tyrants, with equal zest it pursues the saint and wise man
and befouls their treasure.

When the neighborhood suddenly achieved a real epidemic
of diphtheria and Martin shakily preached antitoxin, one-half of
them remembered his failure to save Mary Novak and the other
half clamored, "Oh, give us a rest! You got epidemics on the
brain!" That a number of children quite adequately died did
not make them relinquish their comic epic.

Then it was that Martin came home to Leora and said quietly,
"I'm licked. I've got to get out. Nothing more I can do here.
Take years before they'd trust me again. They're so damned
humorous! I'm going to go get a real job — public health."

"I'm so glad! You're too good for them here. We'll find some
big place where they'll appreciate your work."

"No, that's not fair. I've learned a little something. I've failed
here. I've antagonized too many people. I didn't know how to
handle them. We could stick it out, and I would, except that
life is short and I think I'm a good worker in some ways. Been
worrying about being a coward, about running away, 'turning
my — ' What is it? ' — turning my hand from the plow.' I don't
care now! By God, I know what I can do! Gottlieb saw it! And
I want to get to work. On we go. All right?"

"Of course!"

196

II

He had read in the Journal of the American Medical Associa,
tion that Gustaf Sondelius was giving a series of lectures at
Harvard. He wrote asking whether he knew of a public health
appointment. Sondelius answered, in a profane and blotty scrawl,
that he remembered with joy their Minneapolis vacation, that
he disagreed with Entwisle of Harvard about the nature of meta-
thrombin, that there was an excellent Italian restaurant in Bos-
ton, and that he would inquire among his health-official friends
as to a position.

Two days later he wrote that Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Direc-
tor of Public Health in the city of Nautilus, Iowa, was looking
for a second-in-command, and would probably be willing to
send particulars.

Leora and Martin swooped on an almanac.

"Gosh! Sixty-nine thousand people in Nautilus! Against three
hundred and sixty-six here — no, wait, it's three hundred and
sixty-seven now, with that new baby of Pete Yeska's that the
dirty swine called in Hesselink for. People! People that can
talk! Theaters! Maybe concerts! Leora, we'll be like a pair of
kids let loose from school!"

He telegraphed for details, to the enormous interest of the
station agent, who was also telegraph operator.

The mimeographed form which was sent to him said that
Dr. Pickerbaugh required an assistant who would be the only
full-time medical officer besides Pickerbaugh himself, as the
clinic and school doctors were private physicians working part-
time. The assistant would be epidemiologist, bacteriologist, and
manager of the office clerks, the nurses, and the lay inspectors of
dairies and sanitation. The salary would be twenty-five hundred
dollars a year — against the fifteen or sixteen hundred Martin was
making in Wheatsylvania.

Proper recommendations were desired.

Martin wrote to Sondelius, to Dad Silva, and to Max Gottlieb,
now at the McGurk Institute in New York.

Dr. Pickerbaugh informed him, "I have received very pleasant
letters from Dean Silva and Dr. Sondelius about you, but the
letter from Dr. Gottlieb is quite remarkable. He says you have

197

rare gifts as a laboratory man. I take great pleasure in offering
you the appointment; kindly wire."

Not till then did Martin completely realize that he was leav-
ing Wheatsylvania — the tedium of Bert Tozer's nagging — the
spying of Pete Yeska and the Norbloms — the inevitability of
turning, as so many unchanging times he had turned, south
from the Leopolis road at the Two Mile Grove and following
again that weary, flat, unbending trail — the superiority of Dr.
Hesselink and the malice of Dr. Coughlin — the round which
left him no time for his dusty laboratory — leaving it all for the
achievement and splendor of the great city of Nautilus.

"Leora, we're going! We're really going!"

in

Bert Tozer said:

"You know by golly there's folks that would call you a traitor,
after all we've done for you, even if you did p?y back the thou-
sand, to let some other doc come in here and get all that in-
fluence away from the Family."

Ada Quist said:

"I guess if you ain't any too popular with the folks around
here you'll have one fine time in a big city like Nautilus! Well
Bert and me are going to get married next year and when you
two swells make a failure of it I suppose we'll have to take care
of you at our house when you come sneaking back do you think
we could get your house at the same rent you paid for it oh
Bert why couldn't we take Mart's office instead it would save
money well I've always said since we were in school together
you couldn't stand a decent regular life Ory."

Mr. Tozer said:

"I simply can't understand it, with everything going so nice.
Why, you'd be making three-four thousand a year some day,
if you just stuck to it. Haven't we tried to treat you nice? I
don't like to have my little girl go away and leave me alone,
now I'm getting on in years. And Bert gets so cranky with me
and Mother, but you and Ory would always kind of listen to us.
Can't you fix it somehow so you could stay?"

Pete Yeska said:

"Doc, you could of knocked me down with a feather when

198

I heard you were going! Course you and me have scrapped
about this drug business, but Lord! I been kind of half thinking
about coming around some time and offering you a partnership
and let you run the drug end to suit yourself, and we could get
the Buick agency, maybe, and work up a nice little business.
I'm real sorry you're going to leave us. . . . Well, come back
some day and we'll take a shot at the ducks, and have a good
laugh about that bull you made over the small-pox. I never will
forget that! I was saying to the old woman just the other day,
when she had an ear-ache, 'Ain't got small-pox, have yuh, Bess!' "

Dr. Hesselink said:

"Doctor, what's this I hear? You're not going away? Why,
you and I were just beginning to bring medical practice in this
neck of the woods up to where it ought to be, so I drove over
tonight — Huh? We panned you? Ye-es, I suppose we did, but
that doesn't mean we didn't appreciate you. Small place like
here or Groningen, you have to roast your neighbors to keep
busy. Why, Doctor, I've been watching you develop from an
unlicked cub to a real upstanding physician, and now you're
going away — you don't know how I feel!"

Henry Novak said:

"Why, Doc, you ain't going to leave us? And we got a new
baby coming, and I said to the woman, just the other day, 'It's
a good thing we got a doctor that hands you out the truth and
not all this guff we used to get from Doc Winter.' "

The wheat-buyer at Delft said:

'Doc, what's this I hear? You ain't going away? A fellow
told me you was and I says to him, 'Don't be more of a damn'
fool than the Lord meant you to be,' I says. But I got to worry*
ing about it, and I drove over and — Doc, I fire off my mouth
pretty easy, I guess. I was agin you in the typhoid epidemic,
when you said that seamstress was carrying the sickness around,
and then you showed me up good. Doc, if you'd like to be state
senator, and if you'll stay — I got quite a little influence — believe
me, I'll get out and work my shirt off for you!"

Alec Ingleblad said:

"You're a lucky guy!"

All the village was at the train when they left for Nautilus.

For a hundred autumn-blazing miles Martin mourned his
neighbors. "I feel like getting off and going back. Didn't we

199

used to have fun playing Five Hundred with the Fraziers! I
hate to think of the kind of doctor they may get. I swear, if
some quack setdes there or if Woestijne neglects the health
work again, I'll go back and run 'em both out of business! And
be kind of fun to be state senator, some ways."

But as evening thickened and nothing in all the rushing world
existed save the yellow Pintsch gas globes above them in the
long car, they saw ahead of them great Nautilus, high honor and
achievement, the making of a radiant model city and the praise
of Sondelius — perhaps even of Max Gottlieb.

200

CHAPTER XIX

MIDMOST of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only
by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nau-
tilus bakes and rattles and glistens. For hundreds of
miles the tall corn springs in a jungle of undeviating rows, and
the stranger who sweatily trudges the corn-walled roads is lost
and nervous with the sense of merciless growth.

Nautilus is to Zenith what Zenith is to Chicago.

With seventy thousand people, it is a smaller Zenith but no
less brisk. There is one large hotel to compare with the dozen
in Zenith, but that one is as busy and standardized and frenziedly
modern as its owner can make it. The only authentic difference
between Nautilus and Zenith is that in both cases all the streets
look alike but in Nautilus they do not look alike for so many
miles.

The difficulty in defining its quality is that no one has deter-
mined whether it is a very large village or a very small city. There
are houses with chauffeurs and Bacardi cocktails, but on August
evenings all save a few score burghers sit in their shirt-sleeves on
front porches. Across from the ten-story office building, in which
a little magazine of the New Prose is published by a young
woman who for five months lived in the cafes of Montparnasse,
is an old frame mansion comfortable with maples, and a line of
Fords and lumber-wagons in which the overalled farmers have
come to town.

Iowa has the richest land, the lowest illiteracy rate, the largest
percentages of native-born whites and motor-car owners, and
the most moral and forward-looking cities of all the States, and
Nautilus is the most Iowan city in Iowa. One out of every three
persons above the age of sixty has spent a winter in California,
and among them are the champion horseshoe pitcher of Pasa

201

dena and the woman who presented the turkey which Miss
Mary Pickford, the cinema princess, enjoyed at her Christmas
dinner in 1912.

Nautilus is distinguished by large houses with large lawns and
by an astounding quantity of garages and lofty church spires.
The fat fields run up to the edge of the city, and the scattered
factories, the innumerable railroad side-tracks, and the scraggly
cottages for workmen are almost amid the corn. Nautilus manu-
factures steel windmills, agricultural implements, including the
celebrated Daisy Manure Spreader, and such corn-products as
Maize Mealies, the renowned breakfast-food. It makes brick, it
sells groceries wholesale, and it is the headquarters of the Corn-
Jbelt Co-operative Insurance Company.

One of its smallest but oldest industries is Mugford Christian
College, which has two hundred and seventeen students, and
sixteen instructors, of whom eleven are ministers of the Church
of Christ. The well-known Dr. Tom Bissex is football coach,
health director, and professor of hygiene, chemistry, physics,
French, and German. Its shorthand and piano departments are
known far beyond the limits of Nautilus, and once, though that
was some years ago, Mugford held the Grinnell College baseball
team down to a score of eleven to five. It has never been dis-
graced by squabbles over teaching evolutionary biology — it never
has thought of teaching biology at all.

11

Martin left Leora at the Sims House, the old-fashioned, sec-
ond-best hotel in Nautilus, to report to Dr. Pickerbaugh, Direc-
tor of the Department of Public Health.

The department was on an alley, in a semi-basement at the
back of that large graystone fungus, the City Hall. When he
entered the drab reception-office he was highly received by the
stenographer and the two visiting nurses. Into the midst of their
flutterings — "Did you have a good trip, Doctor? Dr. Picker-
baugh didn't hardly expect you till tomorrow, Doctor. Is Mrs.
Arrowsmith with you, Doctor?" — charged Pickerbaugh, thun-
dering welcomes.

Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh was forty-eight. He was a graduate
of Mugford College and of the Wassau Medical School. He

202

looked somewhat like President Roosevelt, with the same square-
ness and the same bristly mustache, and he cultivated the re-
semblance. He was a man who never merely talked: he either
bubbled or made orations.

He received Martin with four "Well's," which he gave after
the manner of a college cheer; he showed him through the De-
partment, led him into the Director's private office, gave him a
cigar, and burst the dam of manly silence:

"Doctor, I'm delighted to have a man with your scientific
inclinations. Not that I should consider myself entirely without
them. In fact I make it a regular practice to set aside a period
for scientific research, without a certain amount of which even
the most ardent crusade for health methods would scarcely
make much headway."

It sounded like the beginning of a long seminar. Martin set-
tled in his chair. He was doubtful about his cigar, but he found
that it helped him to look more interested.

"But with me, I admit, it's a matter of temperament. I have
often hoped that, without any desire whatever for mere personal
aggrandizement, the powers above may yet grant me the genius
to become at once the Roosevelt and the Longfellow of the great
and universally growing movement for public health measures
is your cigar too mild, Doctor? or perhaps it would be better
to say the Kipling of public health rather than the Longfellow,
because despite the beautiful passages and high moral atmos-
phere of the Sage of Cambridge, his poetry lacked the swing
and punch of Kipling.

"I assume you agree with me, or you will when you have
had an opportunity to see the effect our work has on the city,
and the success we have in selling the idea of Better Health, that
what the world needs is a really inspired, courageous, overtower-
ing leader — say a Billy Sunday of the movement — a man who
would know how to use sensationalism properly and wake the
people out of their sloth. Sometimes the papers, and I can only
say they flatter me when they compare me with Billy Sunday,
the greatest of all evangelists and Christian preachers — some-
times they claim that I'm too sensational. Huh! If they only
could understand it, trouble is I can't be sensational enough!
Still, I try, I try, and — Look here. Here's a placard, it was
painted by my daughter Orchid and the poetry is my own

203

humble effort, and let me tell you it gets quoted around every-
where :

You can't get health

By a pussyfoot stealth,

So let's every health-booster

Crow just li\e a rooster.

"Then there's another — this is a minor thing; it doesn't try
to drive home general abstract principles, but it'd surprise you
the effect it's had on careless housewives, who of course don't
mean to neglect the health of their little ones and merely need
instruction and a little pep put into them, and when they see
a card like this, it makes 'em think:

Boil the mil\ bottles or by gum

You better buy your ticket to Kingdom Come.

"I've gotten quite a lot of appreciation in my small way for
some of these things that didn't hardly take me five minutes
to dash orT. Some day when you get time, glance over this vol-
ume of clippings — just to show you, Doctor, what you can do
if you go at the Movement in the up-to-date and scientific
manner. This one, about the temperance meeting I addressed in
Des Moines — say, I had that hall, and it was jam-pack-full, lift-
ing light up on their feet when I proved by statistics that ninety-
three per cent of all insanity is caused by booze! Then this —
well, it hasn't anything to do with health, directly, but it'll just
indicate the opportunity you'll have here to get in touch with
all the movements for civic weal."

He held out a newspaper clipping in which, above a pen-
and-ink caricature portraying him with large mustached head
on a tiny body, was the headline:

DOC PICKERBAUGH BANNER BOOSTER

OF EVANGELINE COUNTY LEADS BIG

GO-TO-CHURCH DEMONSTRATION HERE

Pickerbaugh looked it over, reflecting, "That was a dandy
meeting! We increased church attendance here seventeen per
cent! Oh, Doctor, you went to Winnemac and had your intern-
ship in Zenith, didn't you? Well, this might interest you then.

204

It's from the Zenith Advocate-Times, and it's by Chum Frink,
who, I think you'll agree with me, ranks with Eddie Guest and
Walt Mason as the greatest, as they certainly are the most pop-
ular, of all our poets, showing that you can bank every time
on the literary taste of the American Public. Dear old Chum!
That was when I was in Zenith to address the national conven*
tion of Congregational Sunday-schools, I happen to be a Con-
gregationalist myself, on 'The Morality of A i Health.' So Chum
Wrote this poem about me:"

Zenith welcomes with high hurraw

A friend in Aim us Pic\erbaugh,

The two-fisted fightin' poet doc

Who stands for health like Gibraltar's roc\.

He's jammed with figgers and facts and fun,

The plucky old, lucky old son — of — a — gun!

For a moment the exuberant Dr. Pickerbaugh was shy.

"Maybe it's kind of immodest in me to show that around.
And when I read a poem with such originality and swing, when
I find a genu-ine vest-pocket masterpiece like this, then I realize
that I'm not a poet at all, no matter how much my jingles may
serve to jazz up the Cause of Health. My brain-children may
teach sanitation and do their little part to save thousands of deal
lives, but they aren't literature, like what Chum Frink turns out
No, I guess I'm nothing but just a plain scientist in an office.

"Still, you'll readily see how one of these efforts of mine, just
by having a good laugh and a punch and some melody in it,
does gild the pill and make careless folks stop spitting on the
sidewalks, and get out into God's great outdoors and get their
lungs packed full of ozone and lead a real hairy-chested he-life.
In fact you might care to look over the first number of a little
semi-yearly magazine I'm just starting — I know for a fact that
a number of newspaper editors are going to quote from it and
so carry on the good work as well as boost my circulation."

He handed to Martin a pamphlet entitled Pickerbaugh Pick-
ings.

In verse and aphorism, Pic\ings recommended good health,
good roads, good business, and the single standard of morality.
Dr. Pickerbaugh backed up his injunctions with statistics as im-
pressive as those the Reverend Ira Hinkley had once used at

205

Digamma Pi. Martin was edified by an item which showed that
among all families divorced in Ontario, Tennessee, and Southern
Wyoming in 1912, the appalling number of fifty-three per cent
of the husbands drank at least one glass of whisky daily.

Before this warning had sunk in, Pickerbaugh snatched
Pickings from him with a boyish, "Oh, you won't want to read
any more of my rot. You can look it over some future time.
But this second volume of my clippings may perhaps interest
you, just as a hint of what a fellow can do."

While he considered the headlines in the scrapbook, Martin
realized that Dr. Pickerbaugh was vastly better known than he
had realized. He was exposed as the founder of the first Rotary
Club in Iowa; superintendent of the Jonathan Edwards Congre-
gational Sunday School of Nautilus; president of the Moccasin
Ski and Hiking Club, of the West Side Bowling Club, and the
1912 Bull Moose and Roosevelt Club; organizer and cheer-
leader of a Joint Picnic of the Woodmen, Moose, Elks, Masons,
Odd Fellows, Turnverein, Knights of Columbus, B'nai B'rith,
and the Y.M.C.A.; and winner of the prizes both for reciting the
largest number of Biblical texts and for dancing the best Irish
jig at the Harvest Moon Soiree of the Jonathan Edwards Bible
Class for the Grown-ups.

Martin read of him as addressing the Century Club of Nautilus
on "A Yankee Doctor's Trip Through Old Europe," and the
Mugford College Alumni Association on "Wanted: A Man-
sized Feetball Coach for Old Mugford." But outside of Nautilus
as well, there were loud alarums of his presence.

He had spoken at the Toledo Chamber of Commerce Weekly
Luncheon on "More Health — More Bank Clearings." He had
edified the National Interurban Trolley Council, meeting at
Wichita, on "Health Maxims for Trolley Folks." Seven thou-
sand, six hundred Detroit automobile mechanics had listened to
his observations on "Health First, Safety Second, and Booze No-
where A-tall." And in a great convention at Waterloo he had
helped organize the first regiment in Iowa of the Anti-rum
Minute Men.

The articles and editorials regarding him, in newspapers, house
organs, and one rubber-goods periodical, were accompanied by
photographs of himself, his buxom wife, and his eight bounding
daughters, depicted in Canadian winter costumes among snow

206

and icicles, in modest but easy athletic costumes, playing tennis
in the backyard, and in costumes of no known genus whatever,
frying bacon against a background of Northern Minnesota pines,

Martin felt strongly that he would like to get away and re-
cover.

He walked back to the Sims House. He realized that to a
civilized man the fact that Pickerbaugh advocated any reform
would be sufficient reason for ignoring it.

When he had gone thus far, Martin pulled himself up, cursed
himself for what he esteemed his old sin of superiority to decent
normal people. . . . Failure. Disloyalty. In medical school, in
private practice, in his bullying health administration. Now
again ?

He urged, "This pep and heartiness stuff of Pickerbaugh's is
exactly the thing to get across to the majority of people the sci-
entific discoveries of the Max Gottliebs. What do I care how
much Pickerbaugh gases before conventions of Sunday School
superintendents and other morons, as long as he lets me alone
and lets me do my work in the lab and dairy inspection?"

He pumped up enthusiasm and came quite cheerfully and
confidently into the shabby, high-ceilinged hotel bedroom where
Leora sat in a rocker by the window.

"Well?" she said.

"It's fine — gave me fine welcome. And they want us to come
to dinner tomorrow evening."

"What's he like?"

"Oh, he's awfully optimistic — he puts things over — he — Oh,
Leora, am I going to be a sour, cranky, unpopular, rotten failure
again?"

His head was buried in her lap and he clung to her affection,
the one reality in a world of chattering ghosts.

in

When the maples fluttered beneath their window in the breeze
that sprang up with the beginning of twilight, when the amiable
citizens of Nautilus had driven home to supper in their shaky
Fords, Leora had persuaded him that Pickerbaugh's flamboyance
would not interfere with his own work, that in any case they
would not remain in Nautilus forever, that he was impatient,

207

And that she loved him dearly. So they descended to supper, an
old-fashioned Iowa supper with corn fritters and many little
dishes which were of interest after the loving but misinformed
cooking of Leora, and they went to the movies and held hands
.and were not ill content.

The next day Dr. Pickerbaugh was busier and less buoyant.
He gave Martin a notion of the details of his work.

Martin had thought of himself, freed from tinkering over cut
fingers and ear-aches, as spending ecstatic days in the laboratory,
emerging only to battle with factory-owners who defied sanita-
tion. But he found that it was impossible to define his work,
except that he was to do a little of everything that Pickerbaugh,
the press, or any stray citizen of Nautilus might think of.

He was to placate voluble voters who came in to complain
of everything from the smell of sewer-gas to the midnight beer
parties of neighbors; he was to dictate office correspondence to
the touchy stenographer, who was not a Working Girl but a
Nice Girl Who Was Working; to give publicity to the news-
papers; to buy paper-clips and floor-wax and report-blanks at
the lowest prices; to assist, in need, the two part-time physicians
in the city clinic; to direct the nurses and the two sanitary
inspectors; to scold the Garbage Removal Company; to arrest —
or at least to jaw at — all public spitters; to leap into a Ford and
rush out to tack placards on houses in which were infectious
diseases; to keep a learned implacable eye on epidemics from
Vladivostok to Patagonia, and to prevent (by methods not very
clearly outlined) their coming in to slay the yeomanry and even
halt the business activities of Nautilus.

But there was a little laboratory work: milk tests, Wasser-
manns for private physicians, the making of vaccines, cultures
in suspected diphtheria.

"I get it," said Leora, as they dressed for the dinner at Picker-
baugh's. "Your job will only take about twenty-eight hours a
day, and the rest of the time you're perfectly welcome to spend
in research, unless somebody interrupts you."

IV

The home of Dr. and Mrs. Almus Pickerbaugh, on the steeple-
prickly West Side, was a Real Old-fashioned Home. It was a

208

wooden house with towers, swings, hammocks, rather mussy
shade trees, a rather mangy lawn, a rather damp arbor, and a^
old carriage-house with a line of steel spikes along the ridge-
pole. Over the front gate was the name: uneedarest.

Martin and Leora came into a shambles of salutations and
daughters. The eight girls, from pretty Orchid aged nineteen
to the five-year-old twins, surged up in a tidal wave of friendly
curiosity and tried to talk all at once.

Their hostess was a plump woman with an air of worried
trustfulness. Her conviction that everything was all right was
constantly struggling with her knowledge that a great many
things seemed to be all wrong. She kissed Leora while Picker-
baugh was pump-handling Martin. Pickerbaugh had a way of
pressing his thumb into the back of your hand which was ex-
traordinarily cordial and painful.

He immediately drowned out even his daughters by an ora-
tion on the Home Nest:

"Here you've got an illustration of Health in the Home. Look
at these great strapping girls, Arrowsmith! Never been sick a
day in their lives — practically — and though Mother does have
her sick-headaches, that's to be attributed to the early neglect
of her diet, because while her father, the old deacon — and a
fine upstanding gentleman of the old school he was, too, if
there ever was one, and a friend of Nathaniel Mugford, to
whom more than any other we owe not only the foundation of
Mugford College but also the tradition of integrity and industry
which have produced our present prosperity — but he had no
knowledge of diet or sanitation, and I've always thought — "

The daughters were introduced as Orchid, Verbena, Daisy,
Jonquil, Hibisca, Narcissa, and the twins, Arbuta and Gladiola.

Mrs. Pickerbaugh sighed:

"I suppose it would be dreadfully conventional to call them
My Jewels — I do so hate these conventional phrases that every-
body uses, don't you? — but that's what they really are to their
mother, and the Doctor and I have sometimes wished — Of
course when we'd started giving them floral names we had to
keep it up, but if we'd started with jewels, just think of all the
darling names we might have used, like Agate and Cameo and
Sardonyx and Beryl and Topaz and Opal and Esmeralda and
Chrysoprase — it is Chrysoprase, isn't it, not Chrysalis? Oh, well,

209

many people have congratulated us on their names as it is. You
know the girls are getting quite famous — their pictures in so
many papers, and we have a Pickerbaugh Ladies' Baseball Team
all our own — only the Doctor has to play on it now, because
I'm beginning to get a little stout."

Except by their ages, it was impossible to tell the daughters
apart. They were all bouncing, all blond, all pretty, all eager, all
musical, and not merely pure but clamorously clean-minded.
They all belonged to the Congregational Sunday School, and
to either the Y.W.CA. or the Camp Fire Girls; they were all
fond of picknicking; and they could all of them, except the
five-year-old twins, quote practically without error the newest
statistics showing the evils of alcohol.

"In fact," said Dr. Pickerbaugh, "we think they're a very strik-
ing brood of chickabiddies."

"They certainly are!" quivered Martin.

"But best of all, they are able to help me put over the doctrine
of the Mens Sana in the Corpus Sano. Mrs. Pickerbaugh and I
have trained them to sing together, both in the home and pub-
licly, and as an organization we call them the Healthette
Octette."

"Really?" said Leora, when it was apparent that Martin had
passed beyond speech.

"Yes, and before I get through with it I hope to popularize
the name Healthette from end to end of this old nation, and
you're going to see bands of happy young women going around
spreading their winged message into every dark corner. Health-
ette Bands! Beautiful and pure-minded and enthusiastic and
good basket-ball players! I tell you, they'll make the lazy and
willful stir their stumps! They'll shame the filthy livers and
filthy talkers into decency! I've already worked out a poem-
slogan for the Healthette Bands. Would you like to hear it?"

Winsome young womanhood wins with a smile
Boozers, spitters, and gamblers from things that are vile.
Our parents and teachers have explained the cause of life,
So against the evil-minded we'll also ma\e strife.
We'll shame them, reclaim them, from bad habits, you bet!
Better watch out, Mr. Loafer, 1 am a Healthette!

210

"But of course an even more important Cause is — and I was
one of the first to advocate it — having a Secretary of Health and
Eugenics in the cabinet at Washington — "

On the tide of this dissertation they were swept through a
stupendous dinner. With a hearty "Nonsense, nonsense, man,
of course you want a second helping — this is Hospitality Hall!"
Pickerbaugh so stuffed Martin and Leora with roast duck,
candied sweet potatoes, and mince pie that they became danger-
ously ill and sat glassy-eyed. But Pickerbaugh himself did not
seem to be affected. While he carved and gobbled, he went on
discoursing till the dining-room, with its old walnut buffet, its
Hoffmann pictures of Christ, and its Remington pictures of
cowpunchers, seemed to vanish, leaving him on a platform be-
side a pitcher of ice-water.

Not always was he merely fantastic. "Dr. Arrowsmith, I tell
you we're lucky men to be able to get a living out of doing our
honest best to make the people in a he-town like this well and
vital. I could be pulling down eight or ten thousand a year in
private practice, and I've been told I could make more than that
in the art of advertising, yet I'm glad, and my dear ones are
glad with me, to take a salary of four thousand. Think of our
hewing a job where we've got nothing to sell but honesty and
decency and the brotherhood o' man!"

Martin perceived that Pickerbaugh meant it, and the shame
of the realization kept him from leaping up, seizing Leora, and
catching the first freight train out of Nautilus.

After dinner the younger daughters desired to love Leora, in
swarms. Martin had to take the twins on his knees and tell them
a story. They were remarkably heavy twins, but no heavier than
the labor of inventing a plot. Before they went to bed, the entire
Healthette Octette sang the famous Health Hymn (written by
Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh) which Martin was to hear on so many
bright and active public occasions in Nautilus. It was set to the
tune of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," but as the twins'
voices were energetic and extraordinarily shrill, it had an effect
all its own:

Oh, are you out for happiness or are you out for pelf?
You owe it to the grand old flag to cultivate yourself,

^ 211

To train the mind, \eep clean the streets, and ever guard your
health.

Then we'll all go marching on.

A healthy mind in A clean body,

A healthy mind in A clean body,

A healthy mind in A clean body,

The slogan for one and all.

As a bedtime farewell, the twins then recited, as they had
recently recited at the Congregational Festival, one of their
Lather's minor lyrics:

What does little birdie say
On the sill at brea\ o' day?
"Hurrah for health in Nautilus
For Pa and Ma and all of us,
Hurray, hurray, hurray!"

"There, my popsywopsies, up to bed we go!" said Mrs. Pick-
erbaugh. "Don't you think, Mrs. Arrowsmith, they're natural-
born actresses? They're not afraid of any audience, and the way
they throw themselves into it — perhaps not Broadway, but the
more refined theaters in New York would just love them, and
maybe they've been sent to us to elevate the drama. Upsy go."

During her absence the others gave a brief musical program.

Verbena, the second oldest, played Chaminade. ("Of course
we all love music, and popularize it among the neighbors, but
Verby is perhaps the only real musical genius in the family.")
But the unexpected feature was Orchid's cornet solo.

Martin dared not look at Leora. It was not that he was sniffily
superior to cornet solos, for in Elk Mills, Wheatsylvania, and
surprisingly large portions of Zenith, cornet solos were done
by the most virtuous females. But he felt that he had been in a
madhouse for dozens of years.

"I've never been so drunk in my life. I wish I could get at
a drink and sober up," he agonized. He made hysterical and
completely impractical plans for escape. Then Mrs. Pickerbaugh,
returning from the still audible twins, sat down at the harp.

While she played, a faded woman and thickish, she fell into
a great dreaming, and suddenly Martin had a picture of her

212

as a gay, good, dove-like maiden who had admired the energetic
young medical student, Almus Pickerbaugh. She must have been
a veritable girl of the late eighties and the early nineties, the
naive and idyllic age of Howells, when young men were pure,
when they played croquet and sang Swanee River; a girl who
sat on a front porch enchanted by the sweetness of lilacs, and
hoped that when Almus and she were married they would have
a nickel-plated baseburner stove and a son who would become
a missionary or a millionaire.

For the first time that evening, Martin managed to put a
respectable heartiness into his "Enjoyed that s' much." He felt
victorious, and somewhat recovered from his weakness.

But the evening's orgy was only begun.

They played word-games, which Martin hated and Leora did
very badly indeed. They acted charades, at which Pickerbaugh
was tremendous. The sight of him on the floor in his wife's fur
coat, being a seal on an ice-floe, was incomparable. Then Martin,
Orchid, and Hibisca (aged twelve) had to present a charade,
and there were complications.

Orchid was as full of simple affections, of smilings and pat-
tings and bouncings, as her younger sisters, but she was nineteen
and not altogether a child. Doubtless she was as pure-minded
and as devoted to Clean and Wholesome Novels as Dr. Picker-
baugh stated, and he stated it with frequency, but she was not
unconscious of young men, even though they were married.

She planned to enact the word doleful, with a beggar asking
a dole, and a corncrib full. As they skipped upstairs to dress,
she hugged Martin's arm, frisked beside him, and murmured,
"Oh, Doctor, I'm so glad Daddy has you for assistant — some-
body that's young and good-looking. Oh, was that dreadful of
me? But I mean: you look so athletic and everything, and the
other assistant director — don't tell Daddy I said so, but he was
an old crank!"

He was conscious of brown eyes and unshadowed virginal
lips. As Orchid put on her agreeably loose costume as a beggar,
he* was also conscious of ankles and young bosom. She smiled
at him, as one who had long known him, and said loyally,
"We'll show 'em! I know you're a dan-dy actor!"

When they bustled downstairs, as she did not take his arm,

213

he took hers, and he pressed it slightly and felt alarmed and
relinquished it with emphasis.

Since his marriage he had been so absorbed in Leora, as lover,
as companion, as helper, that till this hour his most devastating
adventure had been a glance at a pretty girl in a train. But the
flushed young gaiety of Orchid disturbed him. He wanted to be
rid of her, he hoped that he would not be altogether rid of her,
and for the first time in years he was afraid of Leora's eyes.

There were acrobatic feats later, and a considerable promi-
nence of Orchid, who did not wear stays, who loved dancing,
and who praised Martin's feats in the game of "Follow the
Leader."

All the daughters save Orchid were sent to bed, and the rest
of the fete consisted of what Pickerbaugh called "a little quiet
scientific conversation by the fireside," made up of his observa-
tions on good roads, rural sanitation, Ideals in politics, and
methods of letter filing in health departments. Through this
placid hour, or it may have been an hour and a half, Martin
saw that Orchid was observing his hair, his jaw, his hands, and
he had, and dismissed, and had again a thought about the inno-
cent agreeableness of holding her small friendly paw.

He also saw that Leora was observing both of them, and he
suffered a good deal, and had practically no benefit whatever
from Pickerbaugh's notes on the value of disinfectants. When
Pickerbaugh predicted for Nautilus, in fifteen years, a health
department thrice as large, with many full-time clinic and school
physicians and possibly Martin as director (Pickerbaugh him
self having gone off to mysterious and interesting activities in ^
Larger Field), Martin merely croaked, "Yes, that'd be — be fine,"
while to himself he was explaining, "Damn that girl, I wish she
wouldn't shake herself at me."

At half-past eight he had pictured his escape as life's highest
ecstasy; at twelve he took leave with nervous hesitation.

They walked to the hotel. Free from the sight of Orchid, brisk
in the coolness, he forgot the chit and pawed again the problem
of his work in Nautilus.

"Lord, I don't know whether I can do it. To work under that
gas-bag, with his fool pieces about boozers — "

"They weren't so bad," protested Leora.

"Bad? Why, he's probably the worst poet that ever lived, and

214

he certainly knows less about epidemiology than I thought any
one man could ever learn, all by himself. But when it comes to
this — what was it Clif Clawson used to call it? — by the way,
wonder what's ever become of Clif; haven't heard from him for
a couple o' years — when it comes to this 'overpowering Christian
Domesticity' — Oh, let's hunt for a blind-pig and sit around
with the nice restful burglars."

She insisted, "I thought his poems were kind of cute."

"Cute! What a word!"

"It's no worse than the cuss-words you're always using! But
the cornet yowling by that awful oldest daughter — Ugh!"

"Well, now she played darn' well!"

"Martin, the cornet is the kind of an instrument my brother
would play. And you so superior about the doctor's poetry and
my saying 'cute'! You're just as much a backwoods hick as I am,
and maybe more so!"

"Why, gee, Leora, I never knew you to get sore about noth-
ing before! And can't you understand how important — You
see, a man like Pickerbaugh makes all public health work
simply ridiculous by his circusing and his ignorance. If he said
that fresh air was a good thing, instead of making me open my
windows it'd make me or any other reasonable person close 'em.
And to use the word 'science' in those flop-earned limericks or
whatever you call 'em — it's sacrilege!"

"Well, if you want to \now, Martin Arrowsmith, I'll have no
more of these high jinks with that Orchid girl! Practically hug-
ging her when you came downstairs, and then mooning at her
all evening! I don't mind your cursing and being cranky and
even getting drunk, in a reasonable sort of way, but ever since
the lunch when you told me and that Fox woman, 'I hope you
girls won't mind, but I just happen to remember that I'm en-
gaged to both of you' — You're mine, and I won't have any tres-
passers. I'm a cavewoman, and you'd better learn it, and as for
that Orchid, with her simper and her stroking your arm and
her great big absurd feet — Orchid! She's no orchid! She's a
bachelor's button!"

"But, honest, I don't even remember which of the eight she
was."

"Huh! Then you've been making love to all of 'em, that's

215

;vhy. Drat her! Well, I'm not going to go on scrapping about it.
I just wanted to warn you, that's all."

At the hotel, after giving up the attempt to find a short, jovial,
convincing way of promising that he would never flirt with
Orchid, he stammered, "If you don't mind, I think I'll stay
down and walk a little more. I've got to figure this health de-
partment business out."

He sat in the Sims House office — singularly dismal it was,
after midnight, and singularly smelly.

"That fool Pickerbaugh! I wish I'd told him right out that we
know hardly anything about the epidemiology of tuberculosis,
for instance.

"Just the same, she's a darling child. Orchid! She's like an
orchid — no, she's too healthy. Be a great kid to go hunting with.
Sweet. And she acted as if I were her own age, not an old
doctor. I'll be good, oh, I'll be good, but — I'd like to kiss her
once, good! She likes me. Those darling lips, like — like rosebuds!

"Poor Leora. I nev' was so astonished in my life. Jealous. Well,
she's got a right to be! No woman ever stood by a man like —
Lee, sweet, can't you see, idiot, if I skipped round the corner
with seventeen billion Orchids, it'd be you I loved, and never
mybody but you!

"I can't go round singing Healthette Octette Pantalette stuff.
Even if it did instruct people, which it don't. Be almost better
to let 'em die than have to live and listen to —

"Leora said I was a 'backwoods hick.' Let me tell you, young
woman, as it happens I am a Bachelor of Arts, and you may
recall the kind of books the 'backwoods hick' was reading to
you last winter, and even Henry James and everybody and —
Oh, she's right. I am. I do know how to make pipets and agar,
but — And yet some day I want to travel like Sondelius —

"Sondelius! God! If it were he I was working for, instead of
Pickerbaugh, I'd slave for him —

"Or does he pull the bunk, too?

"Now that's iust what I mean. That kind of phrase. 'Pull the
bunk'! Horrible!

"Hell! I'll use any kind of phrase I want to! I'm not one of
your social climbers like Angus. The way Sondelius cusses, for
instance, and yet he's used to all those highbrows —

"And I'll be so busy here in Nautilus that I won't even be

216

able to go on reading. Still — I don't suppose they read much,
but there must be quite a few of these rich men here that know
about nice houses. Clothes. Theaters. That stuff.

"Rats!"

He wandered to an all-night lunch-wagon, where he gloomily
drank coffee. Beside him, seated at the long shelf which served
as table, beneath the noble red-glass window with a portrait of
George Washington, was a policeman who, as he gnawed a
Hamburger sandwich, demanded:

"Say, ain't you this new doctor that's come to assist Picker-
baugh? Seen you at City Hall."

"Yes. Say, uh, say, how does the city like Pickerbaugh? How
do you like him? Tell me honestly, because I'm just starting in,
and, uh — You get me."

With his spoon held inside the cup by a brawny thumb, the
policeman gulped his coffee and proclaimed, while the greasy
friendly cook of the lunch-wagon nodded in agreement:

"Well, if you want the straight dope, he hollers a good deal,
but he's one awful brainy man. He certainly can sling the
Queen's English, and jever hear one of his poems? They're darn'
bright. I'll tell you: There's some people say Pickerbaugh pulls
the song and dance too much, but way I figure it, course maybe
for you and me, Doctor, it'd be all right if he just looked after
the milk and the garbage and the kids' teeth. But there's a lot
of careless, ignorant, foreign slobs that need to be jollied into
using their konks about these health biznai, so's they won't go
getting sick with a lot of these infectious diseases and pass 'em
on to the rest of us, and believe me, old Doc Pickerbaugh is the
boy that gets the idea into their noodles!

"Yes, sir, he's a great old coot — he ain't a clam like some of
these docs. Why, say, one day he showed up at the St. Patrick
picnic, even if he is a dirty Protestant, and him and Father
Costello chummed up like two old cronies, and darn' if he didn't
wrestle a fellow half his age, and awful' near throw him, yes,
you bet he did, he certainly give that young fellow a run for
his money all right! We fellows on the Force all like him, and
we have to grin, the way he comes around and soft-soaps us
into doing a lot of health work that by law we ain't hardly
supposed to do, you might say, instead of issuing a lot of fool
orders. You bet. He's a real guy."

217

"I see," said Martin, and as he returned to the hotel he medi-
tated:

"But think of what Gottlieb would say about him.

"Damn Gottlieb! Damn everybody except Leora!

"I'm not going to fail here, way I did in Wheatsylvania.

"Some day Pickerbaugh will get a bigger job— Huh! He's
just the kind of jollying fourflusher that would climb! But any-
way, I'll have my training then, and maybe I'll make a real
health department here.

"Orchid said we'd go skating this winter —

"Damn Orchid!"

218

CHAPTER XX

MARTIN found in Dr. Pickerbaugh a generous chief.
He was eager to have Martin invent and clamor about
his own Causes and Movements. His scientific knowl-
edge was rather thinner than that of the visiting nurses, but he
had little jealousy, and he demanded of Martin only the belief
that a rapid and noisy moving from place to place is the means
(and possibly the end) of Progress.

In a two-family house on Social Hill, which is not a hill but
a slight swelling in the plain, Martin and Leora found an upper
floor. There was a simple pleasantness in these continuous lawns,
these wide maple-shaded streets, and a joy in freedom from the
peering whispers of Wheatsylvania.

Suddenly they were being courted by the Nice Society of
Nautilus.

A few days after their arrival Martin was summoned to the
telephone to hear a masculine voice rasping:

"Hello. Martin? I bet you can't guess who this is!"

Martin, very busy, restrained his desire to observe, "You win —
g' by!" and he buzzed, with the cordiality suitable to a new
Assistant Director:

"No, I'm afraid I can't."

"Well, make a guess."

"Oh— Clif Clawson?"

"Nope. Say, I see you're looking fine. Oh, I guess I've got you
guessing this time! Go on! Have another try!"

The stenographer was waiting to take letters, and Martin had
not yet learned to become impersonal and indifferent in her
presence. He said with a perceptible tartness:

"Oh, I suppose it's President Wilson. Look here — "

219

"Well, Mart, it's Irve Watters! What do you know about
that!"

Apparently the jester expected large gratification, but it took
ten seconds for Martin to remember who Irving Watters might
be. Then he had it: Watters, the appalling normal medical stu-
dent whose faith in the good, the true, the profitable, had an-
noyed him at Digamma Pi. He made his response as hearty as
he could:

"Well, well, what you doing here, Irve?"

"Why, I'm settled here. Been here ever since internship. And
got a nice little practice, too. Look, Mart, Mrs. Watters and I
want you and your wife — I believe you are married, aren't you?
— to come up to the house for dinner, tomorrow evening, and
I'll put you onto all the local slants."

The dread of Watters's patronage enabled Martin to lie vigor-
ously:

"Awfully sorry — awfully sorry — got a date for tomorrow eve-
ning and the next evening."

"Then come have lunch with me tomorrow at the Elks' Club,
and you and your wife take dinner with us Sunday noon."

Hopelessly, "I don't think I can make it for lunch but — Well,
we'll dine with you Sunday."

It is one of the major tragedies that nothing is more discom-
forting than the hearty affection of the Old Friends who never
were friends. Martin's imaginative dismay at being caught here
by Watters was not lessened when Leora and he reluctantly
appeared on Sunday at one-thirty and were by a fury of Old
Friendship dragged back into the days of Digamma Pi.

Watters's house was new, and furnished in a highly built-in
and leaded-glass manner. He had in three years of practice al-
ready become didactic and incredibly married; he had put on
weight and infallibility; and he had learned many new things
about which to be dull. Having been graduated a year earlier
than Martin and having married an almost rich wife, he was
kind and hospitable with an emphasis which aroused a desire
to do homicide. His conversation was a series of maxims and
admonitions:

"If you stay with the Department of Public Health for a
couple of years and take care to meet the right people, you'll be

220

able to go into very lucrative practice here. It's a fine town-
prosperous — so few dead beats.

"You want to join the country club and take up golf. Best
opportunity in the world to meet the substantial citizens. I've
picked up more than one high-class patient there.

"Pickerbaugh is a good active man and a fine booster but he's
got a bad socialistic tendency. These clinics — outrageous — the
people that go to them that can afford to pay! Pauperize people.
Now this may startle you — oh, you had a lot of crank notions
when you were in school, but you aren't the only one that does
some thinking for himself! — sometimes I believe it'd be better
for the general health situation if there weren't any public health
departments at all, because they get a lot of people into the habit
of going to free clinics instead of to private physicians, and cut
down the earnings of the doctors and reduce their number, so
there are less of us to keep a watchful eye on sickness.

"I guess by this time you've gotten over the funny ideas you
used to have about being practical — 'commercialism' you used to
call it. You can see now that you've got to support your wife and
family, and if you don't, nobody else is going to.

"Any time you want a straight tip about people here, you just
come to me. Pickerbaugh is a crank — he won't give you the right
dope — the people you want to tie up with are the good, solid,
conservative, successful business men."

Then Mrs. Watters had her turn. She was meaty with advice,
being the daughter of a prosperous person, none other than
Mr. S. A. Peaseley, the manufacturer of the Daisy Manure
Spreader.

"You haven't any children?" she sobbed at Leora. "Oh, you
must! Irving and I have two, and you don't know what an
interest they are to us, and they keep us so young."

Martin and Leora looked at each other pitifully.

After dinner, Irving insisted on their recalling the "good times
we used to have together at the dear old U." He took no denial.
"You always want to make folks think you're eccentric, Mart.
You pretend you haven't any college patriotism, but I know
better — I know you're showing off — you admire the old place
and our profs just as much as anybody. Maybe I know you
better than you do yourself! Come on, now; let's give a long
cheer and sing 'Winnemac, Mother of Brawny Men.' "

221

And, "Don't be silly; of course you're going to sing," said
Mrs. Watters, as she marched to the piano, with which she
dealt in a firm manner.

When they had politely labored through the fried chicken and
brick ice cream, through the maxims, gurglings, and memories,
Martin and Leora went forth and spoke in tongues:

"Pickerbaugh must be a saint, if Watters roasts him. I begin
to believe he has sense enough to come in when it rains."

In their common misery they forgot that they had been agi-
tated by a girl named Orchid.

II

Between Pickerbaugh and Irving Watters, Martin was drafted
mto many of the associations, clubs, lodges, and "causes" with
which Nautilus foamed; into the Chamber of Commerce, the
Moccasin Ski and Hiking Club, the Elks' Club, the Odd Fellows,
and the Evangeline County Medical society. He resisted, but
they said in a high hurt manner, "Why, my boy, if you're going
to be a public official, and if you have the slightest appreciation
of their efforts to make you welcome here — "

Leora and he found themselves with so many invitations that
they, who had deplored the dullness of Wheatsylvania, com-
plained now that they could have no quiet evenings at home.
But they fell into the habit of social ease, of dressing, of going
places without nervous anticipation. They modernized their
rustic dancing; they learned to play bridge, rather badly, and
tennis rather well; and Martin, not by virtue and heroism but
merely by habit, got out of the way of resenting the chirp of
small talk.

Probably they were never recognized by their hostesses as
pirates, but considered a Bright Young Couple who, since they
a'ere proteges of Pickerbaugh, must be earnest and forward-
looking, and who, since they were patronized by Irving and
Mrs. Watters, must be respectable.

Watters took them in hand and kept them there. He had so
thick a rind that it was impossible for him to understand that
Martin's frequent refusals of his invitations could conceivably
mean that he did riot wish to come. He detected traces of
heterodoxy in Martin, and with affection, diligence, and an ex-

222

traordinarily heavy humor he devoted himself to the work of
salvation. Frequently he sought to entertain other guests by urg-
ing, "Come on now, Mart, let's hear some of those crazy ideas
of yours!"

His friendly zeal was drab compared with that of his wife.
Mrs. Watters had been reared by her father and by her husband
to believe that she was the final fruit of the ages, and she set
herself to correct the barbarism of the Arrowsmiths. She rebuked
Martin's damns, Leora's smoking, and both their theories of
bidding at bridge. But she never nagged. To have nagged would
have been to admit that there were persons who did not ac-
knowledge her sovereignty. She merely gave orders, brief, hu-
morous, and introduced by a strident "Now don't be silly," and
she expected that to settle the matter.

Martin groaned, "Oh, Lord, between Pickerbaugh and Irve,
it's easier to become a respectable member of society than to go
on fighting."

But Watters and Pickerbaugh were not so great a compulsion
to respectability as the charms of finding himself listened to in
Nautilus as he never had been in Wheatsylvania, and of finding
himself admired by Orchid.

in

He had been seeking a precipitation test for the diagnosis of
syphilis which should be quicker and simpler than the Wasser-
mann. His slackened fingers and rusty mind were becoming
used to the laboratory and to passionate hypotheses when he
was dragged away to help Pickerbaugh in securing publicity.
He was coaxed into making his first speech: an address on
"What the Laboratory Teaches about Epidemics" for the Sunday
Afternoon Free Lecture Course of the Star of Hope Universalist
Church.

He was flustered when he tried to prepare his notes, and on
the morning of the affair he was chill as he remembered the
dreadful thing he would do this day, but he was desperate with
embarrassment when he came up to the Star of Hope Church.

People were crowding in; mature, responsible people. He
quaked, "They're coming to hear me, and I haven't got a darn'
thing to say to 'em!" It made him feel the more ridiculous that

223

they who presumably wished to listen to him should not be
aware of him, and that the usher, profusely shaking hands at
the Byzantine portal, should bluster, "You'll find plenty room
right up the side aisles, young man."

"I'm the speaker for the afternoon."

"Oh, oh, yes, oh, yes, Doctor. Right round to the Bevis Street
entrance, if you please, Doctor."

In the parlors he was unctuously received by the pastor and
a committee of three, wearing morning clothes and a manner
of Christian intellectuality.

They held his hand in turn, they brought up rustling women
to meet him, they stood about him in a polite and twittery circle,
and dismayingly they expected him to say something intelligent.
Then, suffering, ghastly frightened, dumb, he was led through
an arched doorway into the auditorium. Millions of faces were
staring at his apologetic insignificance — faces in the curving lines
of pews, faces in the low balcony, eyes which followed him and
doubted him and noted that his heels were run down.

The agony grew while he was prayed over and sung over.

The pastor and the lay chairman of the Lecture Course opened
with suitable devotions. While Martin trembled and tried to
look brazenly at the massed people who were looking at him,
while he sat nude and exposed and unprotected on the high
platform, the pastor made announcement of the Thursday Mis-
sionary Supper and the Little Lads' Marching Club. They sang
a brief cheerful hymn or two — Martin wondering whether to sit
or stand — and the chairman prayed that "our friend who will
address us today may have power to put his Message across."
Through the prayer Martin sat with his forehead in his hand,
feeling foolish, and raving, "I guess this is the proper attitude —
they're all gawping at me — gosh, won't he ever quit ? — oh, damn
it, now what was that point I was going to make about fumiga-
tion?— oh, Lord, he's winding up and I've got to shoot!"

Somehow, he was standing by the reading-desk, holding it
for support, and his voice seemed to be going on, producing
reasonable words. The blur of faces cleared and he saw indi-
viduals. He picked out a keen old man and tried to make him
laugh and marvel.

He found Leora, toward the back, nodding to him, reassuring

224

him. He dared to look away from the path of faces directly in
front of him. He glanced at the balcony —

The audience perceived a young man who was being earnest
about sera and vaccines but, while his voice buzzed on, that
churchly young man had noted two silken ankles distinguishing
the front row of the balcony, had discovered that they belonged
to Orchid Pickerbaugh and that she was flashing down admira-
tion.

At the end Martin had the most enthusiastic applause ever
known — all lecturers, after all lectures, are gratified by that kind
of applause — and the chairman said the most flattering things
ever uttered, and the audience went out with the most remark-
able speed ever witnessed, and Martin discovered himself hold-
ing Orchid's hand in the parlors while she warbled, in the most
adorable voice ever heard, "Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, you were just
wonderful! Most of these lecturers are old stuffs, but you put it
right over! I'm going to do a dash home and tell Dad. He'll be
so tickled!"

Not till then did he find that Leora had made her way to the
parlors and was looking at them like a wife.

As they walked home Leora was eloquently silent.

"Well, did you like my spiel?" he said, after a suitable time
of indignant waiting.

"Yes, it wasn't bad. It must have been awfully hard to talk
to all those stupid people."

"Stupid? What d'you mean by 'stupid'? They got me splen-
didly. They were fine."

"Were they? Well anyway, thank Heaven, you won't have to
keep up this silly gassing. Pickerbaugh likes to hear himself
talk too well to let you in on it very often."

"I didn't mind it. Fact, don't know but what it's a good thing
to have to express myself publicly now and then. Makes you
think more lucidly."

"As for instance the nice, lovely, lucid politicians!"

"Now you look here, Lee! Of course we know your husband
is a mutt, and no good outside the laboratory, but I do think
you might pretend to be a little enthusiastic over the first address
he's ever made — the very first he's ev-er tackled — when it went
off so well."

"Why, silly, I was enthusiastic. I applauded a lot. I thought

225

you were terribly smart. It's just — There's other things I think
you can do better. What shall we do tonight; have a cold snack
at home or go to the cafeteria?"

Thus was he reduced from hero to husband, and he had all
the pleasures of inappreciation.

He thought about his indignities the whole week, but with
the coming of winter there was a fever of dully sprightly din-
ners and safely wild bridge and their first evening at home,
their first opportunity for secure and comfortable quarreling,
was on Friday. They sat down to what he announced as "getting
back to some real reading, like physiology and a little of this
fellow Arnold Bennett — nice quiet reading," but which consisted
of catching up on the news notes in the medical journals.

He was restless. He threw down his magazine. He demanded:

"What're you going to wear at Pickerbaugh's snow picnic to-
morrow?"

"Oh, I haven't— I'll find something."

"Lee, I want to ask you: Why the devil did you say I talked
too much at Dr. Strafford's last evening? I know I've got most
of the faults going, but I didn't know talking too much was
one of 'em."

"It hasn't been, till now."

"'Till now'!"

"You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! You've been pouting like
a bad brat, all week. What's the matter with you?"

"Well, I — Gosh, it makes me tired! Here everybody is so
enthusiastic about my Star of Hope spiel — that note in the Morn-
ing Frontiersman, and Pickerbaugh says Orchid said it was a
corker — and you never so much as peep!"

"Didn't I applaud? But — It's just that I hope you aren't going
to keep up this drooling."

"You do, do you! Well, let me tell you I am going to keep
it up! Not that I'm going to talk a lot of hot air. I gave 'em
straight science, last Sunday, and they ate it up. I hadn't realized
it isn't necessary to be mushy, to hold an audience. And the
amount of good you can do! Why, I got across more Health
Instruction and ideas about the value of the lab in that three-
quarters of an hour than — I don't care for being a big gun but
it's fine to have people where they have to listen to what you've
got to say and can't butt in, way they did in Wheatsylvania.

226

You bet I'm going to keep up what you so politely call my
damn' fool drooling — "

"Sandy, it may be all right for some people, but not for you.
I can't tell you — that's one reason why I haven't said more about
your talk — I can't tell you how astonished I am to hear you,
who're always sneering at what you call sentimentality, simply
weeping over the Dear Little Tots!"

"I never said that — never used the phrase and you know it.
And by God! You talk about sneering! Just let me tell you thaf
the Public Health Movement, by correcting early faults in chil-
dren, by looking after their eyes and tonsils and so on, can save
millions of lives and make a future generation — ':

"I know it! I love children much more than you do! But I
mean all this ridiculous simpering — "

"Well, gosh, somebody has to do it. You can't work with
people till you educate 'em. There's where old Pick, even if he
is an imbecile, does such good work with his poems and all that
stuff. Prob'ly be a good thing if I could write 'em — golly, won-
der if I couldn't learn to?"

"They're horrible!"

"Now there's a fine consistency for you! The other rvenk.g
you called 'em 'cute.' "

"I don't have to be consistent. I'm a mere woman. You, Martin
Arrowsmith, you'd be the first to tell me so. And for Dr. Picker-
baugh they're all right, but not for you. You belong in a labora-
tory, finding out things, not advertising them. Do you remem-
ber once in Wheatsylvania for five minutes you almost thought
of joining a church and being a Respectable Citizen? Are you
going on for the rest of your life, stumbling into respectability
and having to be dug out again? Will you never learn you're a
barbarian?"

"By God, I am! And — what was that other lovely thing you
called me? — I'm also, soul of my soul, a damn' backwoods hick!
And a fine lot you help! When I want to settle down to a decent
and useful iife and not go 'round antagonizing people, you, the
one that ought to believe in me, you're the first one to crab!"

"Maybe Orchid Pickerbaugh would help you better."

"She probably would! Believe me, she's a darling, and she
did appreciate my spiel at the church, and if you think I'm going

227

to sit up all night listening to you sneering at my work and my
friends — I'm going to have a hot bath. Good night!"

In the bath he gasped that it was impossible he should have
been quarreling with Leora. Why! She was the only person in
the world, besides Gottlieb and Sondelius and Clif Clawson —
by the way, where was Clif? still in New York? didn't Clif
owe him a letter? but anyway — He was a fool to have lost his
iemper, even if she was so stubborn that she wouldn't adjust her
opinions, couldn't see that he had a gift for influencing people.
Nobody would ever stand by him as she had, and he loved her —

He dried himself violently; he dashed in with repentances;
they told each other that they were the most reasonable persons
living; they kissed with eloquence; and then Leora reflected:

"Just the same, my lad, I'm not going to help you fool your-
self. You're not a booster. You're a lie-hunter. Funny, you'd
think to hear about these lie-hunters, like Professor Gottlieb and
your old Voltaire, they couldn't be fooled. But maybe they were
like you: always trying to get away from the tiresome truth,
always hoping to settle down and be rich, always selling their
souls to the devil and then going and doublecrossing the poor
devil. I think — I think — " She sat up in bed, holding her temples
in the labor of articulation. "You're different from Professor
Gottlieb. He never makes mistakes or wastes time on — "

"He wasted time at Hunziker's nostrum factory all right, and
his title is 'Doctor,' not 'Professor,' if you must give him a — "

"If he went to Hunziker's he had some good reason. He's a
genius; he couldn't be wrong. Or could he, even he? But any-
way: you, Sandy, you have to stumble every so often; have to
learn by making mistakes. I will say one thing: you learn from
your crazy mistakes. But I get a little tired, sometimes, watching
you rush up and put your neck in every noose — like being a
blinking orator or yearning over your Orchid."

"Well, by golly! After I come in here trying to make peace!
It's a good thing you never make any mistakes! But one perfect
person in a household is enough!"

He banged into bed. Silence. Soft sounds of "Mart — Sandy!"
He ignored her, proud that he could be hard with her, and so
fell asleep. At breakfast, when he was ashamed and eager, she
was curt.

"I don't care to discuss it," she said.

228

In that wry mood they went on Saturday afternoon to the
Pickerbaughs' snow picnic.

IV

Dr. Pickerbaugh owned a small log cabin in a scanty grove
of oaks among the hillocks north of Nautilus. A dozen of them
drove out in a bob-sled filled with straw and blue woolly robes.
The sleigh bells were exciting and the children leaped out to
run beside the sled.

The school physician, a bachelor, was attentive to Leora; twice
he tucked her in, and that, for Nautilus, was almost compro-
mising. In jealousy Martin turned openly and completely to
Orchid.

He grew interested in her not for the sake of disciplining
Leora but for her own rosy sweetness. She was wearing a tweed
jacket, with a tarn, a flamboyant scarf, and the first breeches any
girl had dared to display in Nautilus. She patted Martin's knee,
and when they rode behind the sled on a perilous toboggan, she
held his waist, resolutely.

She was calling him "Dr. Martin" now, and he had come to
a warm "Orchid."

At the cabin there was a clamor of disembarkation. Together
Martin and Orchid carried in the hamper of food; together they
slid down the hillocks on skiis. When their skiis were entangled,
they rolled into a drift, and as she clung to him, unafraid and
unembarrassed, it seemed to him that in the roughness of tweeds
she was but the softer and more wonderful — eyes fearless, cheeks
brilliant as she brushed the coating of wet snow from them,
flying legs of a slim boy, shoulders adorable in their pretense
of sturdy boyishness —

But "I'm a sentimental fool! Leora was right!" he snarled at
himself. "I thought you had some originality! And poor little
Orchid — she'd be shocked if she knew how sneak-minded you
are!"

But poor little Orchid was coaxing, "Come on, Dr. Martin,
let's shoot off that high bluff. We're the only ones that have
any pep."

"That's because we're the only young ones."

22Q

"It's because you're so young. I'm dreadfully old. I just sit and
moon when you rave about your epidemics and things."

He saw that, with her infernal school physician, Leora was
sliding on a distant slope. It may have been pique and it may
have been relief that he was licensed to be alone with Orchid,
but he ceased to speak to her as though she were a child and he
a person laden with wisdom; ceased to speak to her as though
he were looking over his shoulder. They raced to the high bluff.
They skied down it and fell; they had one glorious swooping
slide, and wrestled in the snow.

They returned to the cabin together, to find the others away.
She stripped off her wet sweater and patted her soft blouse.
They ferreted out a thermos of hot coffee, and he looked at her
as though he was going to kiss her, and she looked back at him
as though she did not mind. As they laid out the food they
hummed with the intimacy of understanding, and when she
trilled, "Now hurry up, lazy one, and put those cups on that
horrid old table," it was as one who was content to be with him
forever.

They said nothing compromising, they did not hold hands,
and as they rode home in the electric snow-flying darkness,
though they sat shoulder by shoulder he did not put his arms
about her except when the bob-sled slewed on sharp corners.
If Martin was exalted with excitement, it was presumably caused
by the wholesome exercises of the day. Nothing happened and
nobody looked uneasy. At parting all their farewells were cheery
and helpful.

And Leora made no comments, though for a day or two there
was about her a chill air which the busy Martin did not investi-
gate.

230

CHAPTER XXI

NAUTILUS was one of the first communities in the
country to develop the Weeks habit, now so richly
grown that we have Correspondence School Week,
Christian Science Week, Osteopathy Week, and Georgia Pine
Week.

A Week is not merely a week.

If an aggressive, wide-awake, live-wire, and go-ahead church
or chamber of commerce or charity desires to improve itself
which means to get more money, it calls in those few energetic
spirits who run any city, and proclaims a Week. This consists
of one month of committee meetings, a hundred columns of
praise for the organization in the public prints, and finally a
day or two on which athletic persons flatter inappreciative audi-
ences in churches or cinema theaters, and the prettiest girls in
town have the pleasure of being allowed to talk to male strangers
on the street corners, apropos of giving them extremely undeco-
rative tags in exchange for the smallest sums which those stran-
gers think they must pay if they are to be considered gentlemen.

The only variation is the Weeks in which the object is not to
acquire money immediately by the sale of tags but by general
advertising to get more of it later.

Nautilus had held a Pep Week, during which a race of rapidly
talking men, formerly book-agents but now called Efficiency
Engineers, went about giving advice to shopkeepers on how to
get money away from one another more rapidly, and Dr. Almus
Pickerbaugh addressed a prayer-meeting on "The Pep of St.
Paul, the First Booster." It had held a Gladhand Week, when
everybody was supposed to speak to at least three strangers daily,
to the end that infuriated elderly traveling salesmen were back-
slapped all day long by hearty and powerful unknown persons.

231

There had also been an Old Home Week, a Write to Mother
Week, a We Want Your Factory in Nautilus Week, an Eat
More Corn Week, a Go to Church Week, a Salvation Army
Week, and an Own Your Own Auto Week.

Perhaps the bonniest of all was Y. Week, to raise eighty thou-
sand dollars for a new Y.M.C.A. building.

On the old building were electric signs, changed daily, an-
nouncing "You Must Come Across," "Young Man Come Along"
and "Your Money Creates 'Appiness." Dr. Pickerbaugh made
nineteen addresses in three days, comparing the Y.M.C.A. to the
Crusaders, the Apostles, and the expeditions of Dr. Cook — who,
he believed, really had discovered the North Pole. Orchid sold
three hundred and nineteen Y. tags, seven of them to the same
man, who afterward made improper remarks to her. She was
rescued by a Y.M.C.A. secretary, who for a considerable time
held her hand to calm her.

No organization could rival Almus Pickerbaugh in the inven-
tion of Weeks.

He started in January with a Better Babies Week, and a very
good Week it was, but so hotly followed by Banish the Booze
Week, Tougher Teeth Week, and Stop the Spitter Week that
people who lacked his vigor were heard groaning, "My health
is being ruined by all this fretting over health."

During Clean-up Week, Pickerbaugh spread abroad a new
lyric of his own composition:

Germs come by stealth

And ruin health,

So listen, pard,

Just drop a card

To some man who'll clean up your yard

And that will hit the old germs hard.

Swat the Fly Week brought him, besides the joy of giving
prizes to the children who had slaughtered the most flies, the
inspiration for two verses. Posters admonished:

Sell your hammer and buy a horn,

But hang onto the old fly-swatter.

If you don't want disease sneaking into the Home

Then to I{ill the fly you gotter!

232

It chanced that the Fraternal Order of Eagles were holding
a state convention at Burlington that week, and Pickerbaugh
telegraphed to them:

Just mention fly -prevention

At the good old 'Eagles' convention.

This was quoted in ninety-six newspapers, including one in
Alaska, and waving the clippings Pickerbaugh explained to
Martin, "Now you see the way a fellow can get the truth across,
if he goes at it right."

Three Cigars a Day Week, which Pickerbaugh invented in
midsummer, was not altogether successful, partly because an
injudicious humorist on a local newspaper wanted to know
whether Dr. Pickerbaugh really expected all babes in arms to
smoke as many as three cigars a day, and partly because the
cigar-manufacturers came around to the Department of Health
with strong remarks about Common Sense. Nor was there thor-
ough satisfaction in Can the Cat and Doctor the Dog Week.

With all his Weeks, Pickerbaugh had time to preside over
the Program Committee of the State Convention of Health
Officers and Agencies.

It was he who wrote the circular letter sent to all members:

Brother Males and She males:

Are you coming to the Health Bee? It will be the livest Hop-
to-it that this busy HI ole planet has ever see. And it's going to
be Practical. We'll J{iss out on all these glittering generalities and
get messages from men as hjn tal\, so we can lug a thin\ or
two (2) home wid us.

Luther Botts, the famous community-sing leader, will be there
to put Wim an Wigor nevery 'thing into the program. John F.
Zeisser, M.A., M.D., nail the rest of the alphabet {part your hair
Jac\ and loo\ cute, the ladies sure love you) will unlimber a
coupla \ey-notes. (On your tootsies, fellers, thar she blows!)
From time to time, if the brakes hold, we will, or shall in the
infinitive, hie oursellufs from wherein we are at to thither, and
grab a lunch with Wild Wittles.

Do it sound li\e a good show? It do! Barber, you're next.
Let's have those cards saying you're coming.

2*4

This created much enthusiasm and merriment. Dr. Feesons
of Clinton wrote to Pickerbaugh:

/ figure it was largely due to your snappy come-on letter that
we pulled such an attendance and with all modesty I thinly we
may say it was the best health convention ever held in the world.
I had to laugh at one old hen, Bostonian or somepun, who was
howling that your letter was "undignified"! Can you beat it!
I thin\ people as hypercritical and lacking in humor as her
should be treated with the dignified contempt they deserve, the
damn fool!

Martin was enthusiastic during Better Babies Week. Leora
and he weighed babies, examined them, made out diet charts,
and in each child saw the baby they could never have. But when
it came to More Babies Week, then he was argumentative. He
believed, he said, in birth-control. Pickerbaugh answered with
theology, violence, and the example of his own eight beauties.

Martin was equally unconvinced by Anti-Tuberculosis Week.
He liked his windows open at night and he disliked men who
spat tobacco juice on sidewalks, but he was jarred by hearing
these certainly esthetic and possibly hygienic reforms proposed
with holy frenzy and bogus statistics.

Any questioning of his fluent figures about tuberculosis, any
hint that the cause of decline in the disease may have been
natural growth of immunity and not the crusades against spit-
ting and stale air, Pickerbaugh regarded as a criticism of his
honesty in making such crusades. He had the personal touchi-
ness of most propagandists; he believed that because he was
sincere, therefore his opinions must always be correct. To de-
mand that he be accurate in his statements, to quote Raymond
Pearl's dictum: "As a matter of objective scientific fact, ex-
tremely little is known about why the mortality from tubercu-
losis has declined" — this was to be a scoundrel who really liked
to befoul the pavements.

Martin was so alienated that he took an anti-social and prob-
ably vicious joy in discovering that though the death-rate in
tuberculosis certainly had decreased during Pickerbaugh's admin-
istration in Nautilus, it had decreased at the same rate in most

234

villages of the district, with no speeches about spitting, no Open
Your Windows parades.

It was fortunate for Martin that Pickerbaugh did not expect
him to take much share in his publicity campaigns but rather
to be his substitute in the office during them. They stirred in
Martin the most furious and complicated thoughts that had ever
afflicted him.

Whenever he hinted criticism, Pickerbaugh answered, "What
if my statistics aren't always exact? What if my advertising, my
jollying of the public, does strike some folks as vulgar? It all
does good; it's all on the right side. No matter what methods
we use, if we can get people to have more fresh air and cleaner
yards and less alcohol, we're justified."

To himself, a little surprised, M^idn put it, "Yes, does it
really matter? Does truth matter — clean, cold, unfriendly truth,
Max Gottlieb's truth? Everybody says, 'Oh, you mustn't tamper
with the truth,' and everybody is furious if you hint that they
themselves are tampering with it. Does anything matter, excepi
making love and sleeping and eating and being flattered?

"I think truth does matter to me, but if it does, isn't the desire
for scientific precision simply my hobby, like another man's ex-
citement about his golf? Anyway, I'm going to stick by Picker-
baugh."

To the defense of his chief he was the more impelled by the
attitude of Irving Watters and such other physicians as attacked
Pickerbaugh because they feared that he really would be success-
ful, and reduce their earnings. But all the while Martin was
weary of unchecked statistics.

He estimated that according to Pickerbaugh's figures on bad
teeth, careless motoring, tuberculosis, and seven other afflictions
alone, every person in the city had a one hundred and eighty
per cent chance of dying before the age of sixteen, and he could
not startle with much alarm when Pickerbaugh shouted, "Do
you realize that the number of people who died from yaws in
Pickens County, Mississippi, last year alone, was twenty-nine
and that they might all have been saved, yes, sir, saved, by a
daily cold shower?"

For Pickerbaugh had the dreadful habit of cold showers,
even in winter, though he might have known that nineteen

235

anen between the ages of seventeen and forty-two died of coiu
jhowers in twenty-two years in Milwaukee alone.

To Pickerbaugh the existence of "variables," a word which
Martin now used as irritatingly as once he had used "control,"
was without significance. That health might be determined by
temperature, heredity, profession, soil, natural immunity, or bv
anything save health-department campaigns for increased wash
:ng and morality, was to him inconceivable.

"Variables! Huh!" Pickerbaugh snorted. "Why, every enlight-
ened man in the public service \nows enough about the causes
of disease — matter now of acting on that knowledge."

When Martin sought to show that they certainly knew very
little about the superiority of fresh air to warmth in schools,
about the hygienic dangers of dirty streets, about the real danger
of alcohol, about the value of face-masks in influenza epidemics,
about most of the things they tub-thumped in their campaigns,
Pickerbaugh merely became angry, and Martin wanted to resign,
^nd saw Irving Watters again, and returned to Pickerbaugh
with new zeal, and was in general as agitated and wretched as
I young revolutionist discovering the smugness of his leaders.

He came to question what Pickerbaugh called "the proven
practical value" of his campaigns as much as the accuracy of
Pickerbaugh's biology. He noted how bored were most of the
newspapermen by being galvanized into a new saving of the
world once a fortnight, and how incomparably bored was the
Man in the Street when the nineteenth pretty girl in twenty
days had surged up demanding that he buy a tag to support an
association of which he had never heard.

But more dismaying was the slimy trail of the dollar which
he beheld in Pickerbaugh's most ardent eloquence.

When Martin suggested that all milk should be pasteurized,
that certain tenements known to be tuberculosis-breeders should
be burnt down instead of being fumigated in a fiddling useless
way, when he hinted that these attacks would save more lives
than ten thousand sermons and ten years of parades by little
girls carrying banners and being soaked by the rain, then Pick-
erbaugh worried, "No, no, Martin, don't think we could do that.
Get so much opposition from the dairymen and the landlords.
Can't accomplish anything in this work unless you keep from
offending people."

236

When Pickerbaugh addressed a church or the home circle he
spoke of "the value of health in making life more joyful," but
when he addressed a business luncheon he changed it to "the
value in good round dollars and cents of having workmen who
are healthy and sober, and therefore able to work faster at the
same wages." Parents' associations he enlightened upon "the sav-
ing in doctors' bills of treating the child before maladjustments
go too far," but to physicians he gave assurance that public
health agitation would merely make the custom of going regu-
larly to doctors more popular.

To Martin, he spoke of Pasteur, George Washington, Victor
Vaughan, and Edison as his masters, but in asking the business
men of Nautilus — the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce,
the association of wholesalers — for their divine approval of more
funds for his department, he made it clear that they were his
masters and lords of all the land, and fatly, behind cigars, they
accepted their kinghood.

Gradually Martin's contemplation moved beyond Almus Pick-
erbaugh to all leaders, of armies or empires, of universities or
churches, and he saw that most of them were Pickerbaughs. He
preached to himself, as Max Gottlieb had once preached to him,
the loyalty of dissent, the faith of being very doubtful, the gospel
of not bawling gospels, the wisdom of admitting the probable
ignorance of one's self and of everybody else, and the energetic
acceleration of a Movement for going very slow.

in

A hundred interruptions took Martin out of his laboratory.
He was summoned into the reception-room of the department
to explain to angry citizens why the garage next door to them
should smell of gasoline; he went back to his cubbyhole to dic-
tate letters to school-principals about dental clinics; he drove out
to Swede Hollow to see what attention the food and dairy in-
spector had given to the slaughter-houses; he ordered a family
in Shanty town quarantined; and escaped at last into the labora-
tory.

It was well lighted, convenient, well stocked. Martin had little
time for anything but cultures, blood-tests, and Wassermanns
for the private physicians of the city, but the work rested him,,

237

and now and then he struggled over a precipitation test which
was going to replace Wassermanns and make him famous.

Pickerbaugh apparently believed that this research would take
six weeks; Martin had hoped to do it in two years; and with
the present interruptions it would require two hundred, by
which time the Pickerbaughs would have eradicated syphilis and
made the test useless.

To Martin's duties was added the entertainment of Leora in
the strange city of Nautilus.

"Do you manage to keep busy all day?" he encouraged her,
and, "Any place you'd like to go this evening?"

She looked at him suspiciously. She was as easily and auto-
matically contented by herself as a pussy cat, and he had never
before worried about her amusement.

IV

The Pickerbaugh daughters were always popping into Mar-
tin's laboratory. The twins broke test-tubes, and made doll tents
out of filter paper. Orchid lettered the special posters for her
father's Weeks, and the laboratory, she said, was the quietest
place in which to work. While Martin stood at his bench he
was conscious of her, humming at a table in the corner. They
talked, tremendously, and he listened with fatuous enthusiasm
to opinions which, had Leora produced them, he would have
greeted with "That's a damn' silly remark!"

He held a clear, claret-red tube of hemolyzed blood up to the
light, thinking half of its color and half of Orchid's ankles as she
bent over the table, absurdly patient with her paint-brushes, curl-
ing her legs in a fantastic knot.

Abruptly he asked her, "Look here, honey. Suppose you —
suppose a kid like you were to fall in love with a married man.
What d'you think she ought to do? Be nice to him? Or chuck
him?"

"Oh, she ought to chuck him. No matter how much she suf-
fered. Even if she liked him terribly. Because even if she liked
him, she oughtn't to wrong his wife."

"But suppose the wife never knew, or maybe didn't care?'*
He had stopped his pretense of working; he was standing before
her, arms akimbo, dark eyes demanding.

238

"Well, if she didn't know — But it isn't that. I believe mar-
riages really and truly are made in Heaven, don't you? Some
day Prince Charming will come, the perfect lover — " She was
so young, her lips were so young, so very sweet! " — and of course
I want to keep myself for him. It would spoil everything if I
made light of love before my Hero came."

But her smile was caressing.

He pictured them thrown together in a lonely camp. He saw
her parroted moralities forgotten. He went through a change
as definite as religious conversion or the coming of insane frenzy
in war; the change from shamed reluctance to be unfaithful to
his wife, to a determination to take what he could get. He
began to resent Leora's demand that she, who had eternally his
deepest love, should also demand his every wandering fancy.
And she did demand it. She rarely spoke of Orchid, but she
could tell (or nervously he thought she could tell) when he
had spent an afternoon with the child. Her mute examination
of him made him feel illicit. He who had never been unctuous
was profuse and hearty as he urged her, "Been home all day?
Well, we'll just skip out after dinner and take in a movie. Or
shall we call up somebody and go see 'em? Whatever you'd
like."

He heard his voice being flowery, and he hated it and knew
that Leora was not cajoled. Whenever he drifted into one of
his meditations on the superiority of his brand of truth to Pick-
erbaugh's, he snarled, "You're a fine bird to think about truth,
you liar!"

He paid, in fact, an enormous price for looking at Orchid's
lips, and no amount of anxiety about the price kept him from
looking at them.

In early summer, two months before the outbreak of the
Great War in Europe, Leora went to Wheatsylvania for a fort-
night with her family. Then she spoke:

"Sandy, I'm not going to ask you any questions when I come
back, but I hope you won't look as foolish as you've been look-
ing lately. I don't think that bachelor's button, that ragweed,
that lady idiot of yours is worth our quarreling. Sandy darling,
I do want you to be happy, but unless I up and die on you some
day, I'm not going to be hung up like an old cap. I warn you.

239

Now about ice. I've left an order for a hundred pounds a week,
and if you want to get your own dinners sometimes — "

When she had gone, nothing immediately happened, though
a good deal was always about to happen. Orchid had the flap-
per's curiosity as to what a man was likely to do, but she was
satisfied by exceedingly small thrills.

Martin swore, that morning of June, that she was a fool and
a flirt, and he "hadn't the slightest intention of going near her."
No! He would call on Irving Watters in the evening, or read,
or have a walk with the school-clinic dentist.

But at half-past eight he was loitering toward her house.

If the elder Pickerbaughs were there — Martin could hear him-
self saying, "Thought I'd just drop by, Doctor, and ask you
what you thought about — " Hang it! Thought about what?
Pickerbaugh never thought about anything.

On the low front steps he could see Orchid. Leaning over her
was a boy of twenty, one Charley, a clerk.

"Hello, Father in?" he cried, with a carelessness on which he
could but pride himself.

"I'm terribly sorry; he and Mama won't be back till eleven.
Won't you sit down and cool off a little?"

"Well — " He did sit down, firmly, and tried to make youthful
conversation, while Charley produced sentiments suitable, in
Charley's opinion, to the aged Dr. Arrowsmitb, and Orchid
made little purry interested sounds, an art in which she was
rery intelligent.

"Been, uh, been seeing many of the baseball games?" said
Martin.

"Oh, been getting in all I can," said Charley. "How's things
going at City Hall? Been nailing a lot of cases of small-pox
md winkulus pinkulus and all those fancy diseases?"

"Oh, keep busy," grunted old Dr. Arrowsmith.

He could think of nothing else. He listened while Charley
and Orchid giggled cryptically about things which barred him
out and made him feel a hundred years old: references to Mamie
and Earl, and a violent "Yeh, that's all right, but any time you
pee me dancing with her you just tell me about it, will yuh!"
Vt the corner, Verbena Pickerbaugh was yelping, and observing,
Now you quit!" to persons unknown.

"Hc.-ljl It isn't worth it! I'm going home," Martin sighed, but

240

at the moment Charley screamed, "Well, ta, ta, be good; gotta
toddle along."

He was left to Orchid and peace and a silence rather embar-
rassing.

"It's so nice to be with somebody that has brains and doesn't
always try to flirt, like Charley," said Orchid.

He considered, "Splendid! She's going to be just a nice good
girl. And I've come to my senses. We'll jus' have a little chat
and I'll go home."

She seemed to have moved nearer. She whispered at him, "I
was so lonely, especially with that horrid dangy boy, till I heard
your step on the walk. I knew it the second I heard it."

He patted her hand. As his pats were becoming more ardent
than might have been expected from the assistant and friend
of her father, she withdrew her hand, clasped her knees, and
began to chatter.

Always it had been so in the evenings when he had drifted
to the porch and found her alone. She was ten times more in-
calculable than the most complex woman. He managed to feel
guilty toward Leora without any of the reputed joys of being
guilty.

While she talked he tried to discover whether she had any
brains whatever. Apparently she did not have enough to attend
a small Midwestern denominational college. Verbena was going
to college this autumn, but Orchid, she explained, thought she
"ought to stay home and help Mama take care of the chicka-
biddies."

"Meaning," Martin reflected, "that she can't even pass the
Mugford entrance exams!" But his opinion of her intelligence
was suddenly enlarged as she whimpered, "Poor little me, prob'ly
I'll always stay here in Nautilus, while you — oh, with your
knowledge and your frightfully strong will-power, I know you're
going to conquer the world!"

"Nonsense, I'll never conquer any world, but I do hope to
pull off a few good health measures. Honestly, Orchid honey,
do you think I have much will-power?"

The full moon was spacious now behind the maples. The
seedy Pickerbaugh domain was enchanted; the tangled grass
was a garden of roses, the ragged grape-arbor a shrine to Diana,
the old hammock turned to fringed cloth of silver, the bad-

tempered and sputtering lawn-sprinkler a fountain, and over all
the world was the proper witchery of moonstruck love. The
little city, by day as noisy and busy as a pack of children, was
stilled and forgotten. Rarely had Martin been inspired to per-
ceive the magic of a perfect hour, so absorbed was he ever in
irascible pondering, but now he was caught, and lifted in rap-
ture.

He held Orchid's quiet hand — and was lonely for Leora.

The belligerent Martin who had carried off Leora had not
thought about romance, because in his clumsy way he had been
romantic. The Martin who, like a returned warrior scented and
enfeebled, yearned toward a girl in the moonlight, now desir-
ously lifted his face to romance and was altogether unromantic.

He felt the duty of making love. He drew her close, but when
she sighed, "Oh, please don't," there was in him no ruthlessness
and no conviction with which to go on. He considered the moon-
light again, but also he considered being at the office early in the
morning, and he wondered if he could without detection slip
out his watch and see what time it was. He managed it. He
stooped to kiss her good-night, and somehow didn't quite kiss
her, and found himself walking home.

As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regarding
himself. He had never, he raged, however stumbling he might
have been, expected to find himself a little pilferer of love, a
peeping, creeping area-sneak, and not even successful in his
sneaking, less successful than the soda-clerks who swanked
nightly with the virgins under the maples. He told himself that
Orchid was a young woman of no great wisdom, a sigher and
drawer-out of her M's and O's, but once he was in his lonely
flat he longed for her, thought of miraculous and completely
idiotic ways of luring her here tonight, and went to bed yearn-
ing, "Oh, Orchid—"

Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and
soft summer, for quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came
swarming all over the laboratory and perched on the bench
with a whisk of stockings, he stalked to her, masterfully seized
her wrists, and kissed her as she deserved to be kissed.

He immediately ceased to be masterful. He was frightened.
He stared at her wanly. She stared back, shocked, eyes wide,
lips uncertain.

242

"Oh!" she profoundly said.

Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:

"Martin — oh — my dear — do you think you ought to have done
that?"

He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there was
nothing in the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory
nor fathers nor wives nor traditions, but only the intensity of
their being together.

Suddenly she babbled, "I know there's lots of conventional
people that would say we'd done wrong, and perhaps I'd have
thought so, one time, but — Oh, I'm terribly glad I'm liberal!
Of course I wouldn't hurt dear Leora or do anything really
wrong for the world, but isn't it wonderful that with so many
bourgeois folks all around, we can rise above them and realize
the call that strength makes to strength and — But I've simply
got to be at the Y.W.C.A. meeting. There's a woman lawyer
from New York that's going to tell us about the Modern
Woman's Career."

When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful
lover. "I've won her," he gloated. . . . Probably never has gloat-
ing been so shakily and badly done.

That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with
Irving Watters, the school-clinic dentist, and a young doctor
from the city clinic, the telephone bell summoned him to an
excited but saccharine:

"This is Orchid. Are you glad I called up?"

"Oh, yes, yes, mighty glad you called up." He tried to make
it at once amorously joyful, and impersonal enough to beguile
the three coa'less, beer-swizzling, grinning doctors.

"Are you doing anything this evening, Marty?"

"Just, uh, couple fellows here for a little game cards."

"Oh!" It was acute. "Oh, then you — I was such a baby to
call you up, but Daddy is away and Verbena and everybody,
and it was such a lovely evening, and I just thought — Do you
think I'm an awful little silly?"

"No — no — sure not."

"I'm so glad you don't. I'd hate it if I thought you thought
I was just a silly to call you up. You don't, do you?"

"No — no — course not. Look, I've got to — "

243

"I know. I mustn't keep you. But I just wanted you to tell
rne whether you thought I was a silly to — "

"No! Honest! Really!"

Three fidgety minutes later, deplorably aware of masculine
snickers from behind him, he escaped. The poker-players said
all the things considered suitable in Nautilus: "Oh, you little
Don Jewen!" and "Can you beat it — his wife only gone for a
week!" and "Who is she, Doctor? Go on, you tightwad, bring
her up here!" and "Say, I know who it is; it's that little milliner
on Prairie Avenue."

Next noon she telephoned from a drug store that she had lain
awake all night, and on profound contemplation decided that
they "mustn't ever do that sort of thing again" — and would he
meet her at the corner of Crimmins Street and Missouri Avenue
at eight, so that they might talk it all over?

In the afternoon she telephoned and changed the tryst to half-
past eight.

At five she called him up just to remind him —

In the laboratory that day Martin transplanted cultures no
more. He was too confusedly human to be a satisfactory experi-
menter, too coldly thinking to be a satisfactory sinful male, and
all the while he longed for the sure solace of Leora.

"I can go as far as I like with her tonight.

"But she's a brainless man-chaser.

"All the better. I'm tired of being a punk philosopher.

"I wonder if these other lucky lovers that you read about in
all this fiction and poetry feel as glum as I do?

"I will not be middle-aged and cautious and monogamic and
moral! It's against my religion. I demand the right to be free —

"Hell! These free souls that have to slave at being free are
just as bad as their Methodist dads. I have enough sound nat-
ural immorality in me so I can afford to be moral. I want to
keep my brain clear for work. I don't want it blurred by duti-
fully running around trying to kiss everybody I can.

"Orchid is too easy. I hate to give up the right of being a
happy sinner, but my way was so straight, with just Leora and
my work, and I'm not going to mess it. God help any man
that likes his work and his wife! He's beaten from the begin-
ning."

He met Orchid at eight-thirty, and the whole matter was un-

244

kind. He was equally distasteful of the gallant Martin of two
days ago and the prosy cautious Martin of tonight. He went
home desolately ascetic, and longed for Orchid all the night.

A week later Leora returned from Wheatsylvania.

He met her at the station.

"It's all right," he said. "I feel a hundred and seven years old.
I'm a respectable, moral young man, and Lord how I'd hate it,
if it wasn't for my precipitation test and you and — Why do you
always lose your trunk check? I suppose I am a bad example
for others, giving up so easily. No, no, darling, can't you see:
that's the transportation check the conductor gave you!"

245

CHAPTER XXII

THIS summer Pickerbaugh had shouted and hand-shaken
his way through a brief Chautauqua tour in Iowa, Ne-
braska, and Kansas. Martin realized that though he
seemed, in contrast to Gustaf Sondelius, an unfortunately articu-
late and generous lout, he was destined to be ten times bettei
known in America than Sondelius could ever be, a thousand
times better known than Max Gottlieb.

He was a correspondent of many of the nickel-plated Great
Men whose pictures and sonorous aphorisms appeared in the
magazines: the advertising men who wrote little books about
Pep and Optimism, the editor of the magazine which told clerks
how to become Goethes and Stonewall Jacksons by studying
correspondence-courses and never touching the manhood-rotting
beer, and the cornfield sage who was equally an authority on
finance, peace, biology, editing, Peruvian ethnology, and making
oratory pay. These intellectual rulers recognized Pickerbaugh as
one of them; they wrote quippish letters to him: and when he
answered he signed himself "Pick," in red pencil.

The Onward March Magazine, which specialized in biogra-
phies of Men Who Have Made Good, had an account of Picker-
baugh among its sketches of the pastor who built his own beau-
tiful Neo-Gothic church out of tin cans, the lady who had in
seven years kept 2,698 factory-girls from leading lives of shame,
atf.d the Oregon cobbler who had taught himself to read Sanskrit,
Finnish, and Esperanto.

"Meet Ol' Doc Almus Pickerbaugh, a he-man whom Chum
Frink has hailed as 'the two-fisted, fighting poet doc,' a scientist
who puts his remarkable discoveries right over third base, yet
who, as a reg'lar old-fashioned Sunday-school superintendent,
rebukes the atheistic so-called scientists that are menacing the

246

foundations of our religion and liberties by their smart-aleck
cracks at everything that is noble and improving," chanted the
chronicler.

Martin was reading this article", trying to realize that it was
actually exposed in a fabulous New York magazine, with a
million circulation, when Pickerbaugh summoned him.

"Mart," he said, "do you feel competent to run this Depart-
ment?"

"Why, uh— "

"Do you think you can buck the Interests and keep a clean
city all by yourself?"

"Why, uh— "

"Because it looks as if I were going to Washington, as the
next congressman from this district!"

"Really?"

"Looks that way. Boy, I'm going to take to the whole nation
the Message I've tried to ram home here!"

Martin got out quite a good "I congratulate you." He was so
astonished that it sounded fervent. He still had a fragment of
his boyhood belief that congressmen were persons of intelli-
gence and importance.

"I've just been in conference with some of the leading Repub-
licans of the district. Great surprise to me. Ha, ha, ha! Maybe
they picked me because they haven't anybody else to run this
year. Ha, ha, ha!"

Martin also laughed. Pickerbaugh looked as though that was
not exactly the right response, but he recovered and caroled on:

"I said to them, 'Gentlemen, I must warn you that I am not
sure I possess the rare qualifications needful in a man who shall
have the high privilege of laying down, at Washington, the rules
and regulations for the guidance, in every walk of life, of this
great nation of a hundred million people. However, gentlemen/
I said, 'the impulse that prompts me to consider, in all modesty,
your unexpected and probably undeserved honor is the fact that
it seems to me that what Congress needs is more forward-
looking scientists to plan and more genu-ine trained business
men to execute the improvements demanded by our evolving
commonwealth, and also the possibility of persuading the Boys
there at Washington of the pre-eminent and crying need of a
Secretary of Health who shall completely control — ' "

247

But no matter what Martin thought about it, the Republicans
■really did nominate Pickerbaugh for Congress.

ii

While Pickerbaugh went out campaigning, Martin was in
charge of the Department, and he began his reign by getting
himself denounced as a tyrant and a radical.

There was no more sanitary and efficient dairy in Iowa than
that of old Klopchuk, on the outskirts of Nautilus. It was tiled
and drained and excellently lighted; the milking machines were
perfect; the bottles were super-boiled; and Klopchuk welcomed
inspectors and the tuberculin test. He had fought the dairymen's
union and kept his dairy open-shop by paying more than the
union scale. Once, when Martin attended a meeting of the
Nautilus Central Labor Council as Pickerbaugh's representative,
the secretary of the council confessed that there was no plant
which they would so like to unionize and which they were so
unlikely to unionize as Klopchuk's Dairy.

Now Martin's labor sympathies were small. Like most labora-
tory men, he believed that the reason why workmen found less
joy in sewing vests or in pulling a lever than he did in a long
research v/as because they were an inferior race, born lazy and
wicked. The complaint of the unions was the one thing to con-
vince him that at last he had found perfection.

Often he stopped at Klopchuk's merely for the satisfaction of
it. He noted but one thing which disturbed him: a milker had
a persistent sore throat. He examined the man, made cultures,
and found hemolytic streptococcus. In a panic he hurried back
to the dairy, and after cultures he discovered that there was
streptococcus in the udders of three cows.

When Pickerbaugh had saved the health of the nation through
all the smaller towns in the congressional district and had re-
turned to Nautilus, Martin insisted on the quarantine of the
infected milker and the closing of the Klopchuk Dairy till no
more infection should be found.

"Nonsense! Why, that's the cleanest place in the city," Picker-
baugh scoffed. "Why borrow trouble? There's no sign of an
epidemic of strep."

"There darn' well will be! Three cows infected. Look at

248

what's happened in Boston and Baltimore, here recently. I've
asked Klopchuk to come in and talk it over."

"Well, you know how busy I am, but — "

Klopchuk appeared at eleven, and to Klopchuk the affair was
tragic. Born in a gutter in Poland, starving in New York, work-
ing twenty hours a day in Vermont, in Ohio, in Iowa, he had
made this beautiful thing, his dairy.

Seamed, drooping, twirling his hat, almost in tears, he pro-
tested, "Dr. Pickerbaugh, I do everything the doctors say is nec-
essary. I know dairies! Now comes this young man and he says
because one of my men has a cold, I kill little children with
diseased milk! I tell you, this is my life, and I would sooner
hang myself than send out one drop of bad milk. The young
man has some wicked reason. I have asked questions. I find he
is a great friend from the Central Labor Council. Why, he go
to their meetings! And they want to break me!"

To Martin the trembling old man was pitiful, but he had
never before been accused of treachery. He said grimly:

"You can take up the personal charges against me later, Dr.
Pickerbaugh. Meantime I suggest you have in some expert to
test my results; say Long of Chicago or Brent of Minneapolis
or somebody."

"I — I — I — " The Kipling and Billy Sunday of health looked
as distressed as Klopchuk. "I'm sure our friend here doesn't
really mean to make charges against you, Mart. He's over-
wrought, naturally. Can't we just treat the fellow that has the
strep infection and not make everybody uncomfortable?"

"All right, if you want a bad epidemic here, toward the end
of your campaign!"

"You know cussed well I'd do anything to avoid — Though
I want you to distinctly understand it has nothing to do with
my campaign for Congress! It's simply that I owe my city the
most scrupulous performance of duty in safeguarding it against
disease, and the most fearless enforcement — "

At the end of his oratory Pickerbaugh telegraphed to Dr. J. C .
Long, the Chicago bacteriologist.

Dr. Long looked as though he had made the train journey
in an ice-box. Martin had never seen a man so free from the
poetry and flowing philanthropy of Almus Pickerbaugh. He
was slim, precise, lipless, lapless, and eye-glassed, and his hair

249

was parted in the middle. He coolly listened to Martin, coldly
listened to Pickerbaugh, icily heard Klopchuk, made his inspec-
tion, and reported, "Dr. Arrowsmith seems to know his busines:
perfectly, there is certainly a danger here, I advise closing the
dairy, my fee is one hundred dollars, thank you no I shall not
stay to dinner I must catch the evening train."

Martin went home to Leora snarling, "That man was just as
lovable as a cucumber salad, but my God, Lee, with his freedom
from bunk he's made me wild to get back to research; away
from all these humanitarians that are so busy hollering about
loving the dear people that they let the people die! I hated him,
but — Wonder what Max Gottlieb's doing this evening? The old
German crank! I'll bet — I'll bet he's talking music or something
with some terrible highbrow bunch. Wouldn't you like to see
the old coot again? You know, just couple minutes. D'l ever tell
you about the time I made the dandy stain of the trypanosomes —
Oh, did I?"

He assumed that with the temporary closing of the dairy the
matter was ended. He did not understand how hurt was Klop-
chuk. He knew that Irving Watters, Klopchuk's physician, was
unpleasant when they met, grumbling, "What's the use going
on being an alarmist, Mart?" But he did not know how many
persons in Nautilus had been trustily informed that this fellow
Arrowsmith was in the pay of labor-union thugs.

in

Two months before, when Martin had been making his an-
nual inspection of factories, he had encountered Clay Tredgold,
the president (by inheritance) of the Steel Windmill Company.
He had heard that Tredgold, an elaborate but easy-spoken man
of forty-five, moved as one clad in purple on the loftiest planes
of Nautilus society. After the inspection Tredgold urged, "Sit
down, Doctor; have a cigar and tell me all about sanitation."

Martin was wary. There was in Tredgold's affable eye a sar-
donic flicker.

"What d'you want to know about sanitation?"

"Oh, all about it."

"The only thing I know is that your men must like you. Of
course you haven't enough wash-bowls in that second-floor toilet

250

room, and the whole lot of 'em swore you were putting in others
immediately. If they like you enough to lie against their own
interests, you must be a good boss, and I think I'll let you get
away with it — till my next inspection! Well, got to hustle."

Tredgold beamed on him. "My dear man, I've been pulling
that dodge on Pickerbaugh for three years. I'm glad to have
seen you. And I think I really may put in some more bowls —
just before your next inspection. Good-by!"

After the Klopchuk affair, Martin and Leora encountered Clay
Tredgold and that gorgeous slim woman, his wife, in front of a
motion-picture theater.

"Give you a lift, Doctor?" cried Tredgold.

On the way he suggested, "I don't know whether you're dry,
like Pickerbaugh, but if you'd like I'll run you out to the house
and present you with the noblest cocktail conceived since Evan-
geline County went dry. Does it sound reasonable?"

"I haven't heard anything so reasonable for years," said
Martin.

The Tredgold house was on the highest knoll (fully twenty
feet above the general level of the plain) in Ashford Grove,
which is the Back Bay of Nautilus. It was a Colonial structure,
with a sun-parlor, a white-paneled hall, and a blue and silver
drawing-room. Martin tried to look casual as they were wafted
in on Mrs. Tredgold's chatter, but it was the handsomest house
he had ever entered.

While Leora sat on the edge of her chair in the manner of
one likely to be sent home, and Mrs. Tredgold sat forward like
a hostess, Tredgold flourished the cocktail-shaker and performed
courtesies:

"How long you been here now, Doctor?"

"Almost a year."

"Try that. Look here, it strikes me you're kind of different
from Salvation Pickerbaugh."

Martin felt that he ought to praise his chief but, to Leora's
gratified amazement, he sprang up and ranted in something
like Pickerbaugh's best manner:

"Gentlemen of the Steel Windmill Industries, than which
there is no other that has so largely contributed to the prosperity
of our commonwealth, while I realize that you are getting away
with every infraction of the health laws that the inspector doesn't

251

<;atch you at, yet I desire to pay a tribute to your high respect
for sanitation, patriotism, and cocktails, and if I only had an
assistant more earnest than young Arrowsmith, I should, with
your permission, become President of the United States."

Tredgold clapped. Mrs. Tredgold asserted, "If that isn't exactly
like Dr. Pickerbaugh!" Leora looked proud, and so did her
husband.

"I'm glad you're free from this socialistic clap-trap of Picker-
baugh's," said Tredgold.

The assumption roused something sturdy and defensive in
Martin:

"Oh, I don't care a hang how socialistic he is — whatever .that
means. Don't know anything about socialism. But since I've
gone and given an imitation of him — I suppose it was probably
disloyal — I must say I'm not very fond of oratory that's so full
of energy it hasn't any room for facts. But mind you, Tredgold,
it's partly the fault of people like your Manufacturers' Associa-
tion. You encourage him to rant. I'm a laboratory man — or
rather, I sometimes wish I were. I like to deal with exact
figures."

"So do I. I was keen on mathematics in Williams," said Tred-
gold.

Instantly Martin and he were off on education, damning the
universities for turning out graduates like sausages. Martin
found himself becoming confidential about "variables," and
Tredgold proclaimed that he had not wanted to take up the
ancestral factory, but to specialize in astronomy.

Leora was confessing to the friendly Mrs. Tredgold how cau-
tiously the wife of an assistant director has to economize and
with that caressing voice of hers Mrs. Tredgold comforted, "I
know. I was horribly hard-up after Dad died. Have you tried
the little Swedish dressmaker on Crimmins Street, two doors
from the Catholic church? She's awfully clever, and so cheap."

Martin had found, for the first time since marriage, a house
in which he was altogether happy; Leora had found, in a woman
with the easy smartness which she had always feared and hated,
the first woman to whom she could talk of God and the price
of toweling. They came out from themselves and were not
laughed at.

It was at midnight, when the charms of bacteriology and

252

toweling were becoming pallid, that outside the house sounded
a whooping, wheezing motor horn, and in lumbered a ruddy
fat man who was introduced as Mr. Schlemihl, president of the
Cornbelt Insurance Company of Nautilus.

Even more than Clay Tredgold was he a leader of the Ash-
ford Grove aristocracy, but, while he stood like an invading
barbarian in the blue and silver room, Schlemihl was cordial:

"Glad meet yuh, Doctor. Well, say, Clay, I'm tickled to death
you've found another highbrow to gas with. Me, Arrowsmith,
I'm simply a poor old insurance salesman. Clay is always telling
me what an illiterate boob I am. Look here, Clay darling, do I
get a cocktail or don't I? I seen your lights! I seen you in here
telling what a smart guy you are! Come on! Mix!"

Tredgold mixed, extensively. Before he had finished, young-
Monte Mugford, great-grandson of the sainted but side-whis-
kered Nathaniel Mugford who had founded Mugford College,
also came in, uninvited. He wondered at the presence of Martin,
found him human, told him he was human, and did his rather
competent best to catch up on the cocktails.

Thus it happened that at three in the morning Martin was
singing to a commendatory audience the ballad he had learned
from Gustaf Sondelius:

She'd a dar\ and a roving eye,
And her hair hung down in ringlets,
A nice girl, a decent girl,
But one of the radish kind.

At four, the Arrowsmiths had been accepted by the most des-
perately Smart Set of Nautilus, and at four-thirty they were
driven home, at a speed neither legal nor kind, by Clay Tred-
gold.

IV

There was in Nautilus a country club which was the axis of
what they called Society, but there was also a tribe of perhaps
twelve families in the Ashford Grove section who, though they
went to the country club for golf, condescended to other golfers,
kept to themselves, and considered themselves as belonging more
to Chicago than to Nautilus. They took turns in entertaining
one another. They assumed that they were all welcome at any

253

party given by any of them, and to none of their parties was
anyone outside the Group invited except migrants from larger
cities and occasional free lances like Martin. They were a tight
Aittle garrison in a heathen town.

The members of the Group were very rich, and one of them,
Montgomery Mugford, knew something about his great-grand-
father. They lived in Tudor manor houses and Italian villas so
new that the scarred lawns had only begun to grow. They had
large cars and larger cellars, though the cellars contained noth-
ing but gin, whisky, vermouth, and a few sacred bottles of rather
sweet champagne. Everyone in the Group was familiar with
New York — they stayed at the St. Regis or the Plaza and went
about buying clothes and discovering small smart restaurants —
and five of the twelve couples had been in Europe; had spent a
week in Paris, intending to go to art galleries and actually going
to the more expensive fool-traps of Montmartre.

In the Group Martin and Leora found themselves welcomed
as poor relations. They were invited to choric dinners, to Sun-
day lunches at the country club. Whatever the event, it always
ended in rapidly motoring somewhere, having a number of
drinks, and insisting that Martin again "give that imitation of
Doc Pickerbaugh."

Besides motoring, drinking, and dancing to the Victrola, the
chief diversion of the Group was cards. Curiously, in this com-
pletely unmoral set, there were no flirtations; they talked with
considerable freedom about "sex," but they all seemed mono-
gamic, all happily married or afraid to appear unhappily mar-
ried. But when Martin knew them better he heard murmurs of
husbands having "times" in Chicago, of wives picking up young
men in New York hotels, and he scented furious restlessness
beneath their superior sexual calm.

It is not known whether Martin ever completely accepted as
a gentleman-scholar the Clay Tredgold who was devoted to every-
thing about astronomy except studying it, or Monte Mugford
as the highly descended aristocrat, but he did admire the Group's
motor cars, shower baths, Fifth Avenue frocks, tweed plus-fours,
and houses somewhat impersonally decorated by daffodillic
young men from Chicago. He discovered sauces and old silver.
He began to consider Leora's clothes not merely as convenient

254

<

coverings, but as a possible expression of charm, and irritably
he realized how careless she was.

In Nautilus, alone, rarely saying much about herself, Leora
had developed an intense mute little life of her own. She be-
longed to'a bridge club, and she went solemnly by herself to
the movies, but her ambition was to know France and it en-
grossed her. It was an old desire, mysterious in source and long
held secret, but suddenly she was sighing:

"Sandy, the one thing I want to do, maybe ten years from
now, is to see Touraine and Normandy and Carcassonne. Could
we, do you think?"

Rarely had Leora asked for anything. He was touched and
puzzled as he watched her reading books on Brittany, as he
caught her, over a highly simplified French grammar, breathing
"J'ay — j'aye — damn it, whatever it is!"

He crowed, "Lee, dear, if you want to go to France — Listen!
Some day we'll shoot over there with a couple of knapsacks on
our backs, and we'll see that ole country from end to end!"

Gratefully yet doubtfully: "You know if you got bored, Sandy,
you could go see the work at the Pasteur Institute. Oh, I would
like to tramp, just once, between high plastered walls, and come
to a foolish little cafe and watch the men with funny red sashes
and floppy blue pants go by. Really, do you think maybe we
could3"

Leora was strangely popular in the Ashford Grove Group,
though she possessed nothing of what Martin called their "ele-
gance." She always had at least one button missing. Mrs. Tred-
gold, best natured as she was least pious of women, adopted her
complete.

Nautilus had always doubted Clara Tredgold. Mrs. Almus
Pickerbaugh said that she "took no part in any movement for
the betterment of the city." For years she had seemed content
to grow her roses, to make her startling hats, to almond-cream
her lovely hands, and listen to her husband's improper stories —
and for years she had been a lonely woman. In Leora she per-
ceived an interested casualness equal to her own. The two
women spent afternoons sitting on the sun-porch, reading, doing
their nails, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing, trusting each
other.

With the other women of the Group Leora was never so inti-

255

mate as with Clara Tredgold, but they liked her, the more be-
cause she was a heretic whose vices, her smoking, her indolence,
her relish of competent profanity, disturbed Mrs. Pickerbaugh
and Mrs. Irving Watters. The Group rather approved all un-
conventionalities — except such economic unconventionalities as
threatened their easy wealth. Leora had tea, or a cocktail, alone
with nervous young Mrs. Monte Mugford, who had been the
lightest-footed debutante in Des Moines four years before and
who hated now the coming of her second baby; and it was to
Leora that Mrs. Schlemihl, though publicly she was rompish and
serene with her porker of a husband, burst out, "If that man
would only quit pawing me — reaching for me — slobbering on
me! I hate it here! I will have my winter in New York — alone!"

The childish Martin Arrowsmith, so unworthy of Leora's old
quiet wisdoms, was not content with her acceptance by the
Group. When she appeared with a hook unfastened or her hair
like a crow's nest, he worried, and said things about her "sloppi-
ness" which he later regretted.

"Why can't you take a little time to make yourself attractive?
God knows you haven't anything else to do! Great Jehoshaphat,
can't you even sew on buttons?"

But Clara Tredgold laughed, "Leora, I do think you have the
sweetest back, but do you mind if I pin you up before the others
come?"

It happened after a party which lasted till two, when Mrs.
Schlemihl had worn the new frock from Lucile's and Jack
Brundidge (by day vice-president and sales-manager of the Maize
Mealies Company) had danced what he belligerently asserted to
be a Finnish polka, that when Martin and Leora were driving
home in a borrowed Health Department car he snarled, "Lee,
why can't you ever take any trouble with what you wear? Here
this morning — or yesterday morning — you were going to mend
that blue dress, and as far as I can figure out you haven't done
a darn' thing the whole day but sit around and read, and then
you come out with that ratty embroidery — "

"Will you stop the car!" she cried.

He stopped it, astonished. The headlights made ridiculously
important a barbed-wire fence, a litter of milkweeds, a bleak
reach of gravel road.

She demanded, "Do you want me to become a harem beauty?

256

I could. I could be a floosey. But I've never taken the trouble.
Oh, Sandy, I won't go on fighting with you. Either I'm the
foolish sloppy wife that I am, or I'm nothing. What do you
want? Do you want a real princess like Clara Tredgold, or do
you want me, that don't care a hang where we go or what we
do as long as we stand by each other? You do such a lot of
worrying. I'm tired of it. Come on now. What do you want?"

"I don't want anything but you. But can't you understand —
I'm not just a climber — I want us both to be equal to anything
we run into. I certainly don't see why we should be inferior to
this bunch, in anything. Darling, except for Clara, maybe,
they're nothing but rich bookkeepers! But we're real soldiers of
fortune. Your France that you love so much — some day we'll go
there, and the French President will be at the N.P. depot to
meet us! Why should we let anybody do anything better than
we can? Technique!"

They talked for an hour in that drab place, between the poi-
sonous lines of barbed wire.

Next day, when Orchid came into his laboratory and begged,
with the wistfulness of youth, "Oh, Dr. Martin, aren't you ever
coming to the house again?" he kissed her so briskly, so cheer-
fully, that even a flapper could perceive that she was unimpor-
tant.

Martin realized that he was likely to be the next Director of
the Department. Pickerbaugh had told him, "Your work is very
satisfactory. There's only one thing you lack, my boy: enthusi-
asm for getting together with folks and giving a long pull and
a strong pull, all together. But perhaps that'll come to you when
you have more responsibility."

Martin sought to acquire a delight in giving long strong pulls
all together, but he felt like a man who has been dragooned
into wearing yellow tights at a civic pageant.

"Gosh, I may be up against it when I become Director," he
fretted. "I wonder if there's people who become what's called
'successful' and then hate it? Well, anyway, I'll start a decent
system of vital statistics in the department before they get me.
I won't lay down! I'll fight! I'll make myself succeed!"

257

CHAPTER XXIII

IT may have been a yearning to give one concentrated dose
of inspiration so powerful that no citizen of Nautilus would
ever again dare to be ill, or perhaps Dr. Pickerbaugh desired
a little reasonable publicity for his congressional campaign, but
certainly the Health Fair which the good man organized was
overpowering.

He got an extra appropriation from the Board of Aldermen;
he bullied all the churches and associations into co-operation;
he made the newspapers promise to publish three columns of
praise each day.

He rented the rather dilapidated wooden "tabernacle" in
which the Reverend Mr. Billy Sunday, an evangelist, had re-
cently wiped out all the sin in the community. He arranged for
a number of novel features. The Boy Scouts were to give daily
drills. There was a W.C.T.U. booth at which celebrated clergy-
men and other physiologists would demonstrate the evils of alco-
hol. In a bacteriology booth, the protesting Martin (in a dinky
white coat) was to do jolly things with test-tubes. An anti-
nicotine lady from Chicago offered to kill a mouse every half-
hour by injecting ground-up cigarette paper into it. The Picker-
baugh twins, Arbuta and Gladiola, now aged six, were to show
the public how to brush its teeth, and in fact they did, until a
sixty-year-old farmer of whom they had lovingly inquired, "Do
you brush your teeth daily?" made thunderous answer, "No, but
I'm going to paddle your bottoms daily, and I'm going to start
in right now."

None of these novelties was so stirring as the Eugenic Family,
who had volunteered to give, for a mere forty dollars a day, an
example of the benefits of healthful practices.

They were father, mother, and five children, all so beautiful

258

and powerful that they had recently been presenting refined
acrobatic exhibitions on the Chautauqua Circuit. None of them
smoked, drank, spit upon pavements, used foul language, or ate
meat. Pickerbaugh assigned to them the chief booth on the plat-
form once sacerdotally occupied by the Reverend Mr. Sunday.

There were routine exhibits: booths with charts and banners
and leaflets. The Pickerbaugh Healthette Octette held song re-
citals, and daily there were lectures, most of them by Picker-
baugh or by his friend Dr. Bissex, football coach and professor
of hygiene and most other subjects in Mugford College.

A dozen celebrities, including Gustaf Sondelius and the gov-
ernor of the state, were invited to come and "give their mes-
sages," but it happened, unfortunately, that none of them seemed
able to get away that particular week.

The Health Fair opened with crowds and success. There was
a slight misunderstanding the first day. The Master Bakers'
Association spoke strongly to Pickerbaugh about the sign "Too
much pie makes pyorrhea" on the diet booth. But the thought-
less and prosperity-destroying sign was removed at once, and the
Fair was thereafter advertised in every bakery in town.

The only unhappy participant, apparently, was Martin. Picker-
baugh had fitted up for him an exhibition laboratory which,
except that it had no running water and except that the fire
laws forbade his using any kind of a flame, was exactly like a
real one. All day long he poured a solution of red ink from one
test-tube into another, with his microscope carefully examined
nothing at all, and answered the questions of persons who
wished to know how you put bacterias to death once you had
caught them swimming about.

Leora appeared as his assistant, very pretty and demure in a
nurse's costume, very exasperating as she chuckled at his low
cursing. They found one friend, the fireman on duty, a splendid
person with stories about pet cats in the fire-house and no tend-
ency to ask questions in bacteriology. It was he who showed
them how they could smoke in safety. Behind the Clean Up and
Prevent Fires exhibit, consisting of a miniature Dirty House
with red arrows to show where a fire might start and an exr
tremely varnished Clean House, there was an alcove with a
broken window which would carry off the smoke of their ciga-
rettes. To this sanctuary Martin, Leora, and the bored fireman

259

w""t>j

retired a dozen times a day, and thus wore through the week.

One other misfortune occurred. The detective sergeant coming
in not to detect but to see the charming spectacle of the mouse
dying in agony from cigarette paper, stopped before the booth
of the Eugenic Family, scratched his head, hastened to the police
station, and returned with certain pictures. He growled to Pick-
er ba ugh:

"Hm. That Eugenic Family. Don't smoke or booze or any-
thing?"

"Absolutely! And look at their perfect health."

"Hm. Better keep an eye on 'em. I won't spoil your show, Doc
— we fellows at City Hall had all ought to stick together. I
won't run 'em out of town till after the Fair. But they're the
Holton gang. The man and woman ain't married, and only one
of the kids is theirs. They've done time for selling licker to the
Indians, but their specialty, before they went into education, used
to be the badger game. I'll detail a plain-clothes man to keep
'em straight. Fine show you got here, Doc. Ought to give this
city a lasting lesson in the value of up-to-date health methods.
Good luck! Say, have you picked your secretary yet, for when
you get to Congress? I've got a nephew that's a crackajack
stenographer and a bright kid and knows how to keep his
mouth shut about stuff that don't concern him. I'll send him
around to have a talk with you. So long."

But, except that once he caught the father of the Eugenic
Family relieving the strain of being publicly healthy by taking
a long, gurgling, ecstatic drink from a flask, Pickerbaugh found
nothing wrong in their conduct, till Saturday. There was noth-
ing wrong with anything, till then.

Never had a Fair been such a moral lesson, or secured so
much publicity. Every newspaper in the congressional district
gave columns to it, and all the accounts, even in the Democratic
papers, mentioned Pickerbaugh's campaign.

Then, on Saturday, the last day of the Fair, came tragedy.

There was terrific rain, the roof leaked without restraint, and
the lady in charge of the Healthy Housing Booth, which also
leaked, was taken home threatened with pneumonia. At noon,
when the Eugenic Family were giving a demonstration of per-
fect vigor, their youngest blossom had an epileptic fit, and before
the excitement was over, upon the Chicago anti-nicotine lady as

260

she triumphantly assassinated a mouse charged an anti-vivisec-
tion lady, also from Chicago.

Round the two ladies and the unfortunate mouse gathered a
crowd. The anti-vivisection lady called the anti-nicotine lady a
murderer, a wretch, and an atheist, all of which the anti-nico-
tine lady endured, merely weeping a little and calling for the
police. But when the anti-vivisection lady wound up, "And as
for your pretensions to know anything about science, you're no
scientist at all!" then with a shriek the anti-nicotine lady leaped
from her platform, dug her fingers into the anti-vivisection lady's
hair, and observed with distinctness, "I'll show you whether I
know anything about science!"

Pickerbaugh tried to separate them. Martin, standing happily
with Leora and their friend the fireman on the edge, distinctly
did not. Both ladies turned on Pickerbaugh and denounced him.
and when they had been removed he was the center of a thou-
sand chuckles, in decided danger of never going to Congress.

At two o'clock, when the rain had slackened, when the after-
lunch crowd had come in and the story of the anti ladies was
running strong, the fireman retired behind the Clean Up and
Prevent Fires exhibit for his hourly smoke. He was a very sleepy
and unhappy little fireman; he was thinking about the pleasant
fire-house and the unending games of pinochle. He dropped the
match, unextinguished, on the back porch of the model Clean
House. The Clean House had been so handsomely oiled that
it was like kindling soaked in kerosene. It flared up, and in-
stantly the huge and gloomy Tabernacle was hysterical with
flames. The crowd rushed toward the exits.

Naturally, most of the original exits of the Tabernacle had
been blocked by booths. There was a shrieking panic, and chil-
dren were being trampled.

Almus Pickerbaugh was neither a coward nor slothful. Sud-
denly, coming from nowhere, he was marching through the
Tabernacle at the head of his eight daughters, singing "Dixie,"
his head up, his eyes terrible, his arms wide in pleading. The
crowd weakly halted. With the voice of a clipper captain he un-
snarled them and ushered them safely out, then charged back
into the spouting flames.

The rain-soaked building had not caught. The fireman, with
Martin and the head of the Eugenic Family, was beating the

261

flames. Nothing was destroyed save the Clean House, and the
crowd which had fled in agony came back in wonder. Their
hero was Pickerbaugh.

Within two hours the Nautilus papers vomited specials which
explained that not merely had Pickerbaugh organized the great-
est lesson in health ever seen, but he had also, by his courage
and his power to command, saved hundreds of people from
being crushed, which latter was probably the only completely
accurate thing that has been said about Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh
in ten thousand columns of newspaper publicity.

Whether to see the Fair, Pickerbaugh, the delightful ravages
of a disaster, or another fight between the anti ladies, half the
city struggled into the Tabernacle that evening, and when Pick-
erbaugh took the platform for his closing lecture he was greeted
with frenzy. Next day, when he galloped into the last week of
his campaign, he was overlord of all the district.

ii

His opponent was a snufify little lawyer whose strength lay in
his training. He had been state senator, lieutenant governor,
county judge. But the Democratic slogan, "Pickerbaugh the
Pick-up Candidate," was drowned in the admiration for the hero
of the health fair. He dashed about in motors, proclaiming, "I
am not running because I want office, but because I want the
chance to take to the whole nation my ideals of health." Every-
where was plastered:

For Congress
PICKERBAUGH

The two-fisted fighting poet doc

Just elect him for a term
And all through the nation hell swat the germ.

Enormous meetings were held. Pickerbaugh was ample and
vague about his Policies. Yes, he was opposed to our entering
the European War, but he assured them, he certainly did assure
them, that he was for using every power of our Government
to end this terrible calamity. Yes, he was for high tariff, but it
must be so adjusted that the farmers in his district could buy

262

everything cheaply. Yes, he was for high wages for each and
every workman, but he stood like a rock, like a boulder, like a
moraine, for protecting the prosperity of all manufacturers, mer-
chants, and real-estate owners.

While this larger campaign thundered, there was proceeding
in Nautilus a smaller and much defter campaign, to re-elect as
mayor one Mr. Pugh, Pickerbaugh's loving chief. Mr. Pugh sat
nicely at desks, and he was pleasant and promissory to every-
body who came to see him; clergymen, gamblers, G.A.R. vet-
erans, circus advance-agents, policemen, and ladies of reasonable
virtue — everybody except perhaps socialist agitators, against
whom he staunchly protected the embattled city. In his speeches
Pickerbaugh commended Pugh for "that firm integrity and
ready sympathy with which His Honor had backed up every
movement for the public weal," and when Pickerbaugh (quite
honestly) begged, "Mr. Mayor, if I go to Congress you must
appoint Arrowsmith in my place; he knows nothing about poli-
tics but he's incorruptible," then Pugh gave his promise, and
amity abode in that land. . . . Nobody said anything at all
about Mr. F. X. Jordan.

F. X. Jordan was a contractor with a generous interest in
politics. Pickerbaugh called him a grafter, and the last time
Pugh had been elected — it had been on a Reform Platform,
though since that time the reform had been coaxed to behave
itself and be practical — both Pugh and Pickerbaugh had de-
nounced Jordan as a "malign force." But so kindly was Mayor
Pugh that in the present election he said nothing that could hurt
Mr. Jordan's feelings, and in return what could Mr. Jordan do
but speak forgivingly about Mr. Pugh to the people in blind-
pigs and houses of ill fame?

On the evening of the election, Martin and Leora were among
the company awaiting the returns at the Pickerbaughs'. They
were confident. Martin had never been roused by politics, but
he was stirred now by Pickerbaugh's twitchy pretense of indif-
ference, by the telephoned report from the newspaper office,
"Here's Willow Grove township — Pickerbaugh leading, two to
one!" by the crowds which went past the house howling, "Pick-
erbaugh, Pickerbaugh, Pickerbaugh!"

At eleven the victory was certain, and Martin, his bowels weak

263

with unconfidence, realized that he was now Director of Public
Health, with responsibility for seventy thousand lives.

He looked wistfully toward Leora and in her still smile found
assurance.

Orchid had been airy and distant with Martin all evening,
and dismayingly chatty and affectionate with Leora. Now she
drew him into the back parlor and "So I'm going off to Wash-
ington— and you don't care a bit!" she said, her eyes blurred
and languorous and undefended. He held her, muttering, "You
darling child, I can't let you go!" As he walked home he thought
less of being Director than of Orchid's eyes.

In the morning he groaned, "Doesn't anybody ever learn any-
thing? Must I watch myself and still be a fool, all my life?
Doesn't any story ever end?"

He never saw her afterward, except on the platform of the
train.

Leora surprisingly reflected, after the Pickerbaughs had gone,
"Sandy dear, I know how you feel about losing your Orchid.
It's sort of Youth going. She really is a peach. Honestly, I can
appreciate how you feel, and sympathize with you — I mean, of
course, providin' you aren't ever going to see her again."

in

Over the 'Nautilus Cornfield's anouncement was the vigorous
headline:

ALMUS PICKERBAUGH WINS

First Scientist Ever Elected

to Congress

Side-\icf{ of Darwin and Pasteur

Gives New Punch to Steering

Ship of State

Pickerbaugh's resignation was to take effect at once; he was,
he explained, going to Washington before his term began, to
study legislative methods and start his propaganda for the crea-
tion of a national Secretaryship of Health. There was a consid-
erable struggle over the appointment of Martin in his stead.
Klopchuk the dairyman was bitter; Irving WTatters whispered
to fellow doctors that Martin was likely to extend the socialistic

264

free clinics; F. X. Jordan had a sensible young doctor as his own
candidate. It was the Ashford Grove Group, Tredgold, Schle-
mihl, Monte Mugford, who brought it off.

Martin went to Tredgold worrying, "Do the people want me ?
Shall I fight Jordan or get out?"

Tredgold said balmily, "Fight? What about? I own a good
share of the bank that's lent various handy little sums to Mayor
Pugh. You leave it to me."

Next day Martin was appointed, but only as Acting Director,
with a salary of thirty-five hundred instead of four thousand.

That he had been put in by what he would have called
"crooked politics" did not occur to him.

Mayor Pugh called him in and chuckled:

"Doc, there's been a certain amount of opposition to you,
because you're pretty young and not many folks know you. I
haven't any doubt I can give you the full appointment later —
if we find you're competent and popular. Meantime you better
avoid doing anything brash. Just come and ask my advice. I
know this town and the people that count better than you do."

IV

The day of Pickerbaugh's leaving for Washington was made
a fiesta. At the Armory, from twelve to two, the Chamber of
Commerce gave to everybody who came a lunch of hot wienies,
doughnuts, and coffee, with chewing gum for the women and,
for the men, Schweinhugel's Little Dandy Nautilus-made Che-
roots.

The train left at three-fifty-five. The station was, to the aston-
ishment of innocent passengers gaping from the train windows,
jammed with thousands.

By the rear platform, on a perilous packing box, Mayor Pugh
held forth. The Nautilus Silver Cornet Band played three patri-
otic selections, then Pickerbaugh stood on the platform, his fam-
ily about him. As he looked on the crowd, tears were in his
eyes.

"For once," he stammered, "I guess I can't make a speech.
D-dafn it, I'm all choked up! I meant to orate a lot, but all
I can say is — I love you all, I'm mighty grateful, I'll represent
you my level best, neighbors! God bless you!"

265

The train moved out, Pickerbaugh waving as long as he could
see them.

And Martin to Leora, "Oh, he's a fine old boy. He — No, I'm
hanged if he is! The world's always letting people get away with
asininities because they're kind-hearted. And here I've sat back
like a coward, not saying a word, and watched 'em loose that
wind-storm on the whole country. Oh, curse it, isn't anything in
the world simple? Well, let's go to the office, and I'll begin to
do things conscientiously and all wrong."

266

CHAPTER XXIV

IT cannot be said that Martin showed any large ability for
organization, but under him the Department of Public
Health changed completely. He chose as his assistant Dr.
Rufus Ockford, a lively youngster recommended by Dean Silva
of Winnemac. The routine work, examination of babies, quaran-
tines, anti-tuberculosis placarding, went on as before.

Inspection of plumbing and food was perhaps more thorough,
because Martin lacked Pickerbaugh's buoyant faith in the lay
inspectors, and one of them he replaced, to the considerable dis-
pleasure of the colony of Germans in the Homedale district.
Also he gave thought to the killing of rats and fleas, and he
regarded the vital statistics as something more than a recording
of births and deaths. He had notions about their value which
were most amusing to the health department clerk. He wanted a
record of the effect of race, occupation, and a dozen other factors
upon the disease rate.

The chief difference was that Martin and Rufus Ockford
found themselves with plenty of leisure. Martin estimated that
Pickerbaugh must have used half his time in being inspirational
and eloquent.

He made his first mistake in assigning Ockford to spend part
of the week in the free city clinic, in addition to the two half-
time physicians. There was fury in the Evangeline County Medi-
cal Society. At a restaurant, Irving Watters came over to Martin's
table.

"I hear you've increased the clinic staff," said Dr. Watters.

"Yuh."

"Thinking of increasing it still more?"

"Might be a good idea."

"Now you see here, Mart. As you know, Mrs. Watters and

267

I have done everything in our power to make you and Leora
welcome. Glad to do anything I can for a fellow alumnus of old
Winnemac. But at the same time, there are limits, you know!
Not that I've got any objection to your providing free clinical
facilities. Don't know but what it's a good thing to treat the
damn', lazy, lousy pauper-class free, and keep the D.B.'s off the
books of the regular physicians. But same time, when you begin
to make a practice of encouraging a lot of folks, that can afford
to pay, to go and get free treatment, and practically you attack
the integrity of the physicians of this city, that have been giving
God knows how much of their time to charity — "

Martin answered neither wisely nor competently: "Irve, sweet-
heart, you can go straight to hell!"

After that hour, when they met there was nothing said be-
tween them.

Without disturbing his routine work, he found himself able
to sink blissfully into the laboratory. At first he merely tinkered,
but suddenly he was in full cry, oblivious of everything save his
experiment.

He was playing with cultures isolated from various dairies and
various people, thinking mostly of Klopchuk and streptococcus.
Accidentally he discovered the lavish production of hemolysin
in sheep's blood as compared with the blood of other animals.
Why should streptococcus dissolve the red blood corpuscles of
sheep more easily than those of rabbits?

It is true that a busy health-department bacteriologist has no
right to waste the public time in being curious, but the irrespon-
sible sniffing beagle in Martin drove out the faithful routineer.

He neglected the examination of an ominously increasing
number of tubercular sputums; he set out to answer the question
of the hemolysin. He wanted the streptococcus to produce its
blood-destroying poison in twenty-four-hour cultures.

He beautifully and excitedly failed, and sat for hours medi-
tating. He tried a six-hour culture. He mixed the supernatant
fluid from a centrifugated culture with a suspension of red blood
corpuscles and placed it in the incubator. When he returned,
two hours after, the blood cells were dissolved.

He telephoned to Leora: "Lee! Got something! C'n you pack
up sandwich and come down here f'r evening?"

"Sure," said Leora.

268

When she appeared he explained to her that his discovery was
accidental, that most scientific discoveries were accidental, and
that no investigator, however great, could do anything more than
see the value of his chance results.

He sounded mature and rather angry.

Leora sat in the corner, scratching her chin, reading a medical
journal. From time to time she reheated coffee, over a doubtful
Bunsen flame. When the office staff arrived in the morning they
found something that had but rarely occurred during the regime
of Almus Pickerbaugh: the Director of the Department was
transplanting cultures, and on a long table was his wife, asleep.

Martin blared at Dr. Ockford, "Get t' hell out of this, Rufus,
and take charge of the department for today — I'm out — I'm dead
— and oh, say, get Leora home and fry her a couple o' eggs, and
you might bring me a Denver sandwich from the Sunset Traiii
Lunch, will you?"

"You bet, chief," said Ockford.

Martin repeated his experiment, testing the cultures for hemo-
lysin after two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen,
and eighteen hours of incubation. He discovered that the maxi-
mum production of hemolysin occurred between four and ten
hours. He began to work out the formula of production — and
he was desolate. He fumed, raged, sweated. He found that his
mathematics was childish, and all his science rusty. He pottered
with chemistry, he ached over his mathematics, and slowly he
began to assemble his results. He believed that he might have a
paper for the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Now Almus Pickerbaugh had published scientific papers —
often. He had published them in the Midwest Medical Quar-
terly, of which he was one of fourteen editors. He had discov-
ered the germ of epilepsy and the germ of cancer — two entirely
different germs of cancer. Usually it took him a fortnight to
make the discovery, write the report, and have it accepted.
Martin lacked this admirable facility.

He experimented, he re-experimented, he cursed, he kept
Leora out of bed, he taught her to make media, and was ill-
pleased by her opinions on agar. He was violent to the stenog-
rapher; not once could the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Con-
gregational Church get him to address the Bible Class; and stiH
for months his paper was not complete.

269

The first to protest was His Honor the Mayor. Returning
from an extremely agreeable game of chemin de fer with F. X.
Jordan, taking a short cut through the alley behind the City
Hall, Mayor Pugh saw Martin at two in the morning drearily
putting test-tubes into the incubator, while Leora sat in a corner
smoking. Next day he summoned Martin, and protested.

"Doc, I don't want to butt in on your department — my spe-
cialty is never butting in — but it certainly strikes me that after
being trained by a seventy-horse-power booster like Pickerbaugh,
you ought to know that it's all damn' foolishness to spend so
much time in the laboratory, when you can hire an Ai labora-
tory fellow for thirty bucks a week. What you ought to be doing
is jollying along these sobs that are always panning the admin-
istration. Get out and talk to the churches and clubs, and help
me put across the ideas that we stand for."

"Maybe he's right," Martin considered. "I'm a rotten bacteri-
ologist. Probably I never will get this experiment together. My
job here is to keep tobacco-chewers from spitting. Have I the
right to waste the tax-payers' money on anything else?"

But that week he read, as an announcement issued by the
McGurk Institute of Biology of New York, that Dr. Max Gott-
lieb had synthesized antibodies in vitro.

He pictured the saturnine Gottlieb not at all enjoying the
triumph but, with locked door, abusing the papers for their ex-
aggerative reports of his work; and as the picture became sharp
Martin was like a subaltern stationed in a desert isle when he
learns that his old regiment is going off to an agreeable Border
war.

Then the McCandless fury broke.

ii

Mrs. McCandless had once been a "hired girl"; then nurse,
then confidante, then wife to the invalid Mr. McCandless, whole-
sale grocer and owner of real estate. When he died she inherited
everything. There was a suit, of course, but she had an excellent
lawyer.

She was a grim, graceless, shady, mean woman, yet a nympho-
maniac. She was not invited into Nautilus society, but in her

270

unaired parlor, on the mildewed couch, she entertained seedy,
belching, oldish married men, a young policeman to whom she
often lent money, and the contractor-politician, F. X. Jordan.

She owned, in Swede Hollow, the filthiest block of tenements
in Nautilus. Martin had made a tuberculosis map of these tene-
ments, and in conferences with Dr. Ockford and Leora he de-
nounced them as murder-holes. He wanted to destroy them, but
the police power of the Director of Public Health was vague.
Pickerbaugh had enjoyed the possession of large power only
because he never used it.

Martin sought a court decision for the demolition of the Mc
Candless tenements. Her lawyer was also the lawyer of F. X.
Jordan, and the most eloquent witness against Martin was Dr.
Irving Watters. But it chanced, because of the absence of the
proper judge, that the case came before an ignorant and honest
person who quashed the injunction secured by Mrs. McCandless's
lawyer and instructed the Department of Public Health that il
might use such methods as the city ordinances provided for
emergencies.

That evening Martin grumbled to young Ockford, "You don't
suppose for a moment, do you, Rufus, that McCandless and
Jordan won't appeal the case? Let's get rid of the tenements
while it's comparatively legal, heh?"

"You bet, chief," said Ockford, and, "Say, let's go out to
Oregon and start practice when we get kicked out. Well, we
can depend on our sanitary inspector, anyway. Jordan seduced
his sister, here 'bout six years back."

At dawn a gang headed by Martin and Ockford, in blue over-
alls, joyful and rowdyish, invaded the McCandless tenements,
drove the tenants into the street, and began to tear down the
flimsy buildings. At noon, when lawyers appeared and the ten-
ants were in new flats commandeered by Martin, the wreckers
set fire to the lower stories, and in half an hour the buildings
had been annihilated.

F. X. Jordan came to the scene after lunch. A filthy Martin
and a dusty Ockford were drinking coffee brought by Leora.

"Well, boys," said Jordan, "you've put it all over us. Only if
you ever pull this kind of stunt again, use dynamite and save a
lot of time. You know, I like you boys — I'm sorry for what I've

271

got to do to you. But may the saints help you, because it's just
a question of time when I learn you not to monkey with the
buzz-saw."

in

Clay Tredgold admired their amateur arson and rejoiced,
"Fine! I'm going to back vou up in everything the D.P.H.
does."

Martin was not too pleased by the promise, for Tredgold's set
were somewhat exigent. They had decided that Martin and
Leora were free spirits like themselves, and amusing, but they
had also decided, long before the Arrowsmiths had by coming
to Nautilus entered into authentic existence, that the Group had
a monopoly of all Freedom and Amusingness, and they expected
the Arrowsmiths to appear for cocktails and poker every Satur-
day and Sunday evening. They could not understand why
Martin should desire to spend his time in a laboratory, drudging
over something called "streptolysin," which had nothing to do
with cocktails, motors, steel windmills, or insurance.

On an evening perhaps a fortnight after the destruction of the
McCandless tenements, Martin was working late in the labora-
tory. He wasn't even doing experiments which might have
diverted the Group — causing bacterial colonies to cloud liquids,
or making things change color. He was merely sitting at a table,
looking at logarithmic tables. Leora was not there, and he was
mumbling, "Confound her, why did she have to go and be
sick today?"

Tredgold and Sohlemihl and their wives were bound for the
Old Farmhouse Inn. They had telephoned to Martin's flat and
learned where he was. From the alley behind City Hall they
could peer in and see him, dreary and deserted.

"We'll take the old boy out and brighten him up. First, let's
rush home and shake up a few cocktails and bring 'em down
to surprise him," was Tredgold's inspiration.

Tredgold came into the laboratory, a half-hour later, with
much clamor.

"This is a nice way to put in a moonlit spring evening, young
Narrowsmith! Come on, we'll all go out and dance a little.
Grab your hat."

272

"Gosh, Clay, I'd like to, but honestly I can't. I've got to work;
simply got to."

"Rats! Don't be silly. You've been working too hard. Here —
look what Father's brought. Be reasonable. Get outside of a nice
long cocktail and you'll have a new light on things."

Martin was reasonable up to that point, but he did not have
a new light. Tredgold would not take No. Martin continued
to refuse, affectionately, then a bit tartly. Outside, Schlemihl
pressed down the button of the motor horn and held it, produc-
ing a demanding, infuriating yawp which made Martin cry,
"For God's sake go out and make 'em quit that, will you, and
let me alone! I've got to work, I told you!"

Tredgold stared a moment. "I certainly shall! I'm not accus-
tomed to force my attentions on people. Pardon me for disturb-
ing you!"

By the time Martin sulkily felt that he must apologize, the car
was gone. Next day and all the week, he waited for Tredgold
to telephone, and Tredgold waited for him to telephone, and
they fell into a circle of dislike. Leora and Clara Tredgold saw
each other once or twice, but they were uncomfortable, and a
fortnight later, when the most prominent physician in town
dined with the Tredgolds and attacked Martin as a bumptious
and narrow-visioned young man, both the Tredgolds listened
and agreed.

Opposition to Martin developed all at once.

Various physicians were against him, not only because of the
enlarged clinics, but because he rarely asked their help and never
their advice. Mayor Pugh considered him tactless. Klopchuk and
F. X. Jordan were assailing him as crooked. The reporters dis-
liked him for his secrecy and occasional brusqueness. And the
Group had ceased to defend him. Of all these forces Martin
was more or less aware, and behind them he fancied that doubt-
ful business men, sellers of impure ice-cream and milk, owners
of unsanitary shops and dirty tenements, men who had always
hated Pickerbaugh but who had feared to attack him because
of his popularity, were gathering to destroy the entire Depart-
ment of Public Health. . . . He appreciated Pickerbaugh in
those days, and loved soldier-wise the Department.

There came from Mayor Pugh a hint that he would save trou-
ble by resigning. He would not resign. Neither would he go to

273

the citizens begging for support. He did his work, and leaned
on Leora's assurance, and tried to ignore his detractors. He could

ilOt.

News-items and three-line editorial squibs dug at his tyranny,
his ignorance, his callowness. An old woman died after treat-
ment at the clinic, and the coroner hinted that it had been the
fault of "our almighty health-officer's pet cub assistant." Some-
where arose the name "the Schoolboy Czar" for Martin, and it
stuck.

In the gossip at luncheon clubs, in discussions at the Parents'
and Teachers' Association, in one frank signed protest sent to
the Mayor, Martin was blamed for too strict an inspection of
milk, for insufficiently strict inspection of milk; for permitting
garbage to lie untouched, for persecuting the over-worked gar-
bage collectors; and when a case of small-pox appeared in the
Bohemian section, there was an opinion that Martin had gone
out personally and started it.

However vague the citizens were as to the nature of his wick-
edness, once they lost faith in him they lost it completely and
with joy, and they welcomed an apparently spontaneously gen-
erated rumor that he had betrayed his benefactor, their beloved
Dr. Pickerbaugh, by seducing Orchid.

At this interesting touch of immorality, he had all the fashion-
able churches against him. The pastor of the Jonathan Edwards
Church touched up a sermon about Sin in High Places by a
reference to "one who, while like a Czar he pretends to be safe-
guarding the city from entirely imaginary dangers, yet winks
at the secret vice rampant in hidden places; who allies himself
with the forces of graft and evil and the thugs who batten on
honest but deluded Labor; one who cannot arise, a manly man
among men, and say, 'I have a clean heart and clean hands.' "

It is true that some of the delighted congregation thought that
this referred to Mayor Pugh, and others applied it to F. X.
Jordan, but wise citizens saw that it was a courageous attack
on that monster of treacherous lewdness, Dr. Arrowsmith.

In all the city there were exactly two ministers who defended
him: Father Costello of the Irish Catholic Church and Rabbi
Rovine. They were, it happened, very good friends, and not at
all friendly with the pastor of the Jonathan Edwards Church.
They bullied their congregations; each of them asserted, "People

274

come sneaking around with criticisms of our new Director of
Health. If you want to make charges, make them openly. I will
not listen to cowardly hints. And let me tell you that this city
is lucky in having for health-officer a man who is honest and
who actually knows something!"

But their congregations were poor.

Martin realized that he was lost. He tried to analyze his un-
popularity.

"It isn't just Jordan's plotting and Tredgold's grousing and
Pugh's weak spine. It's my own fault. I can't go out and soft-
soap the people and get their permission to help keep them well.
And I won't tell them what a hell of an important thing my
work is — that I'm the one thing that saves the whole lot of em
from dying immediately. Apparently an official in a democratic
state has to do those things. Well, I don't! But I've got to think
up something or they'll emasculate the whole Department."

One inspiration he did have. If Pickerbaugh were here, he
could crush, or lovingly smother, the opposition. He remem-
bered Pickerbaugh's farewell: "Now, my boy, even if I'm way
off there in Washington, this Work will be as close to my heart
as it ever was, and if you should really need me, you just send
for me and I'll drop everything and come."

Martin wrote hinting that he was very much needed.

Pickerbaugh replied by return mail — good old Pickerbaugh!-^
but the reply was, "I cannot tell you how grieved I am that I
cannot for the moment possibly get away from Washington but
am sure that in your earnestness you exaggerate strength of op-
position, write me freely, at any time."

"That's my last shot," Martin said to Leora. "I'm done. Mayor
Pugh will lire me, just as soon as he comes back from his fishing
trip. I'm a failure again, darling."

"You're not a failure, and you must eat some of this nice steak,
and what shall we do now — time for us to be moving on, any-
way— I hate staying in one place," said Leora.

"I don't know what we'll do. Maybe I could get a job at
Hunziker's. Or go back to Dakota and try to work up a practice.
What I'd like is to become a farmer and get me a big shot-gun
and drive every earnest Christian citizen off the place. But
meantime I'm going to stick here. I might win yet — with just a
couple of miracles and a divine intervention. Oh, God, I am so

275

tired! Are you coming back to the lab with me this evening?
Honest, I'll quit early — before eleven, maybe."

He had completed his paper on the streptolysin research, and
he took a day off to go to Chicago and talk it over with an
editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases. As he left Nautilus
he was confused. He had caught himself rejoicing that he was
free of Wheatsylvania and bound for great Nautilus. Time bent
back, progress was annihilated, and he was mazed with futility.

The editor praised his paper, accepted it, and suggested only
one change. Martin had to wait for his train. He remembered
that Angus Duer was in Chicago, with the Rouncefield Clinic —
a private organization of medical specialists, sharing costs and
profits.

The clinic occupied fourteen rooms in a twenty-story building
constructed (or so Martin certainly remembered it) of marble,
gold, and rubies. The clinic reception-room, focused on a vast
stone fireplace, was like the drawing-room of an oil magnate,
hut it was not a place of leisure. The young woman at the door
demanded Martin's symptoms and address. A page in buttons
sped with his name to a nurse, who flew to the inner offices.
Before Angus appeared, Martin had to wait a quarter-hour in a
smaller, richer, still more abashing reception-room. By this time
he was so awed that he would have permitted the clinic surgeons
to operate on him for any ill which at the moment they hap-
pened to fancy.

In medical school and Zenith General Hospital, Angus Duer
had been efficient enough, but now he was ten times as self-
assured. He was cordial; he invited Martin to step out for a dish
of tea as though he almost meant it; but beside him Martin felt
young, rustic, inept.

Angus won him by pondering, "Irving Watters? He was
Digam? I'm not sure I remember him. Oh, yes — he was one of
these boneheads that are the curse of every profession."

When Martin had sketched his conflict at Nautilus, Angus
suggested, "You better come join us here at Rouncefield, as
pathologist. Our pathologist, is leaving in a few weeks. You
could do the job, all right. You're getting thirty-five hundred
a year now? Well, I think I could get you forty-five hundred,
as a starter, and some day you'd become a regular member of

276

the ciinic and get in on all the profits. Let me know if you want
it. Rouncefield told me to dig up a man."

With this resource and with an affection for Angus, Martin
returned to Nautilus and open war. When Mayor Pugh returned
he did not discharge Martin, but he appointed over him, as full
Director, Pickerbaugh's friend, Dr. Bissex, the football coach
and health director of Mugford College.

Dr. Bissex first discharged Rufus Ockford, which took five
minutes, went out and addressed a Y.M.C.A. meeting, then
bustled in and invited Martin to resign.

"I will like hell!" said Martin. "Come on, be honest, Bissex.
If you want to fire me, do it, but let's have things straight. I
won't resign, and if you do fire me I think I'll take it to the
courts, and maybe I can turn enough light on you and His
Honor and Frank Jordan to keep you from taking all the guts
out of the work here."

"Why, Doctor, what a way to talk! Certainly I won't fire
you," said Bissex, in the manner of one who has talked to dif-
ficult students and to lazy football teams. "Stay with us as long
as you like. Only, in the interests of economy, I reduce your
salary to eight hundred dollars a year!"

"All right, reduce and be damned," said Martin.

It sounded particularly fine and original when he said it, but
less so when Leora and he found that, with their rent fixed by
their lease, they could not by whatever mean economies live on
less than a thousand a year.

Now that he was free from responsibility he began to form
his own faction, to save the Department. He gathered Rabbi
Rovine, Father Costello, Ockford, who was going to remain in
town and practice, the secretary of the Labor Council, a banker
who regarded Tredgold as "fast," and that excellent fellow the
dentist of the school clinic.

"With people like that behind me, I can do something," he
gloated to Leora. "I'm going to stick by it. I'm not going to
have the D.P.H. turned into a Y.M.C.A. Bissex has all of Picker-
baugh's mush without his honesty and vigor. I can beat him!
I'm not much of an executive, but I was beginning to visualize
a D.P.H. that would be solid and not gaseous — that would save
kids and prevent epidemics. I won't give it up. You watch me!*1

277

His committee made representations to the Commercial Club,
and for a time they were certain that the chief reporter of the
Frontiersman was going to support them, "as soon as he could
get his editor over being scared of a row." But Martin's bel-
ligerency was weakened by shame, for he never had enough
money to meet his bills, and he was not used to dodging irate
grocers, receiving dunning letters, standing at the door arguing
with impertinent bill-collectors. He, who had been a city digni-
tary a few days before, had to endure, "Come on now, you pay
up, you dead beat, or I'll get a cop!" When the shame had
grown to terror, Dr. Bissex suddenly reduced his salary another
two hundred dollars.

Martin stormed into the mayor's office to have it out, and
found F. X. Jordan sitting with Pugh. It was evident that they
both knew of the second reduction and considered it an excellent
joke.

He reassembled his committee. "I'm going to take this into
the courts," he raged.

"Fine," said Father Costello; and Rabbi Rovine: "Jenkins, that
radical lawyer, would handle the case free."

The wise banker observed, "You haven't got anything to take
into the courts till they discharge you without cause. Bissex has
a legal right to reduce your salary all he wants to. The city regu-
lations don't fix the salary for anybody except the Director and
the inspectors. You haven't a thing to say."

With a melodramatic flourish Martin protested, "And I sup-
pose I haven't a thing to say if they wreck the Department!"

"Not a thing, if the citv doesn't care."

"Well, I care! I'll starve before I'll resign!"

"You'll starve if you don't resign, and your wife, too. Now
here's my plan," said the banker. "You go into private practice
here — I'll finance your getting an office and so on — and when
the time comes, maybe in five or ten years from now, we'll all
get together again and have you put in as full Director."

"Ten years of waiting — in 'Nautilus? Nope. I'm licked. I'm a
complete failure — at thirty-two! I'll resign. I'll wander on," said
Martin.

"I know I'm going to love Chicago," said Leora.

278

IV

He wrote to Angus Duer. He was appointed pathologist in
the Rouncefield Clinic. But, Angus wrote, "they could not at
the moment see their way clear to pay him forty-five hundred
a year, though they were glad to go to twenty-five hundred."

Martin accepted.

When the Nautilus papers announced that Martin had re-
signed, the good citizens chuckled, "Resigned? He got kicked
out, that's what happened." One of the papers had an innocent
squib:

Probably a certain amount of hypocrisy is inevitable in us sin-
ful human critters, but when a public official tries to pose as a
saint while indulging in every vice, and tries to cover up his
gross ignorance and incompetence by pulling political wires, and
makes a holy show of himself by not even doing a first-class job
of wire-pulling, then even the cussedest of us old scoundrels
begins to holler for the meat-ax.

Pickerbaugh wrote to Martin from Washington:

/ greatly regret to hear that you have resigned your post. 1
cannot tell you how disappointed I am, after all the pains I too\
in breaking you in and making you acquainted with my ideals.
Bissex informs me that, because of crisis in city finances, he had
to reduce your salary temporarily. Well personally I would rather
wor\ for the D.P.H. for nothing a year and earn my \eep by
being a night watchman than give up the fight for everything
that is decent and constructive. I am sorry. I had a great liking
for you, and your defection, your going bac\ to private practice
merely for commercial gain, your selling out for what I presume
is a very high emolument, is one of the very greatest blows I
have recently had to sustain.

VI

As they rode up to Chicago Martin thought aloud:

"I never knew I could be so badly licked. I never want to set

279

a laboratory or a public health office again. I'm done with every-
thing but making money.

"I suppose this Rouncefield Clinic is probably nothing but a
gilded boob-trap — scare the poor millionaire into having all the
fancy kinds of examinations and treatments the traffic will bear.
I hope it is! I expect to be a commercial-group doctor the rest
of my life. I hope I have the sense to be!

"All wise men are bandits. They're loyal to their friends, but
they despise the rest. Why not, when the mass of people despise
them if they aren't bandits? Angus Duer had the sense to see
this from the beginning, way back in medic school. He's prob-
ably a perfect technician as a surgeon, but he knows you get
only what you grab. Think of the years it's taken me to learn
what he savvied all the time!

"Know what I'll do? I'll stick to the Rouncefield Clinic till
I'm making maybe thirty thousand a year, and then I'll get
Ockford and start my own clinic, with myself as internist and
head of the whole shooting-match, and collect every cent I can.

"All right, if what people want is a little healing and a lot
of tapestry, they shall have it — and pay for it.

"I never thought I could be such a failure — to become a com-
mercialist and not want to be anything else. And I don't want
to be anything else, believe me! I'm through!"

280

CHAPTER XXV

THEN for a year with each day longer than a sleepless
night, yet the whole year speeding without events or sea-
sons or eagerness, Martin was a faithful mechanic in that
most competent, most clean and brisk and visionless medical
factory, the Rouncefield Clinic. He had nothing of which to
complain. The clinic did, perhaps, give over-many roentgenolog-
ical examinations to socially dislocated women who needed chil-
dren and floor-scrubbing more than pretty little skiagraphs; they
did, perhaps, view all tonsils with too sanguinary a gloom; but
certainly no factory could have been better equipped or more
gratifyingly expensive, and none could have routed its raw hu-
man material through so many processes so swiftly. The Martin
Arrowsmith who had been supercilious toward Pickerbaughs
and old Dr. Winters had for Rouncefield and Angus Duer and
the other keen taut specialists of the clinic only the respect of
the poor and uncertain for the rich and shrewd.

He admired Angus's firmness of purpose and stability of habit.

Angus had a swim or a fencing lesson daily; he swam easily
and fenced like a still-faced demon. He was in bed before eleven-
thirty; he never took more than one drink a day; and he never
read anything or said anything which would not contribute to
his progress as a Brilliant Young Surgeon. His underlings knew
that Dr. Duer would not fail to arrive precisely on time, pre-
cisely well dressed, absolutely sober, very cool, and appallingly
unpleasant to any nurse who made a mistake or looked for a
smile.

Martin would without fear have submitted to the gilded and
ardent tonsil-snatcher of the clinic, would have submitted to
Angus for abdominal surgery or to Rouncefield for any opera-

281

don of the head or neck, providing he was himself quite sure
the operation was necessary, but he was never able to rise to the
clinic's lyric faith that any portions of the body without which
people could conceivably get along should certainly be removed
at once.

The real flaw in his year of Chicago was that through all his
working day he did not live. With quick hands, and one-tenth
of his brain, he made blood counts, did urinalyses and Wasser-
manns and infrequent necropsies, and all the while he was dead,
in a white-tiled coffin. Amid the blattings of Pickerbaugh and
the peepings of Wheatsylvania, he had lived, had fought his en-
vironment. Now there was nothing to fight.

After hours, he almost lived. Leora and he discovered the
world of book-shops and print-shops and theaters and concerts.
They read novels and history and travel; they talked, at dinners
given by Rouncefield or Angus, to journalists, engineers, bank-
ers, merchants. They saw a Russian play, and heard Mischa
Elman, and read Gottlieb's beloved Rabelais. Martin learned to
flirt without childishness, and Leora went for the first time to
a hair-dresser and to a manicure, and began her lessons in
French. She had called Martin a "lie-hunter," a "truth-seeker."
They decided now, talking it over in their tight little two-and-
quarter room flat, that most people who called themselves "truth-
seekers" — persons who scurry about chattering of Truth as
though it were a tangible separable thing, like houses or salt or
bread — did not so much desire to find Truth as to cure their
mental itch. In novels, these truth-seekers quested the "secret of
life" in laboratories which did not seem to be provided with
Bunsen flames or reagents; or they went, at great expense and
much discomfort from hot trains and undesirable snakes, to
Himalayan monasteries, to learn from unaseptic sages that the
Mind can do all sorts of edifying things if one will but spend
thirty or forty years in eating rice and gazing on one's navel.

To these high matters Martin responded, "Rot!" He insisted
that there is no Truth but only many truths; that Truth is not
a colored bird to be chased among the rocks and captured by
its tail, but a skeptical attitude toward life. He insisted that no
one could expect more than, by stubbornness or luck, to have
the kind of work he enjoyed and an ability to become better

282

acquainted with the facts of that work than the average job-
holder.

His mechanistic philosophy did not persuade him that he was
progressing adequately. When he tried to match himself with
the experts of the clinic or with their professional friends, he
was even more uncomfortable than he had been under the dis-
concerting scorn of Dr. Hesselink of Groningen. At clinic lunch-
eons he met surgeons from London, New York, Boston; men
with limousines and social positions and the offensive briskness
of the man who has numerous engagements, or the yet more
offensive quietness of the person who is amused by his inferiors;
master technicians, readers of papers at medical congresses, ex-
ecutives and controllers, unafraid to operate before a hundred
peering doctors, or to give well-bred and exceedingly final orders
to subordinates; captain-generals of medicine, never doubting
themselves; great priests and healers; men mature and wise and
careful and blandly cordial.

In their winged presences, Max Gottlieb seemed an aged
fusser, Gustaf Sondelius a mountebank, and the city of Nautilus
unworthy of passionate warfare. As their suave courtesy smoth-
ered him, Martin felt like a footman.

In long hours of increasing frankness and lucidity he discussed
with Leora the question of "What is this Martin Arrowsmith
and whither is he going?" and he admitted that the sight of the
Famous Surgeons disturbed his ancient faith that he was some-
how a superior person. It was Leora who consoled him:

"I've got a lovely description for your dratted Famous Sur-
geons. You know how polite and important they are, and they
smile so carefully? Well, don't you remember you once said
that Professor Gottlieb called all such people like that 'men of
measured merriment'?"

He caught up the phrase; they sang it together; and they
made of it a beating impish song:

"Men of measured merriment! Men of measured merriment!
Damn the great executives, the men of measured merriment,
damn the men with careful smiles, damn the men that run the
shops, oh, damn their measured merriment, the men with meas-
ured merriment, oh, damn their measured merriment, and damn
their careful smiles!"

283

While Martin developed in a jagged way from the boy of
Wheatsylvania to mature man, his relations to Leora developed
from loyal boy-and-girl adventurousness to lasting solidity. They
had that understanding of each other known only to married
people, a few married people, wherein for all their differences
they were as much indissoluble parts of a whole as are the eye
and hand. Their identification did not mean that they dwelt
always in rosy bliss. Because he was so intimately fond of her
and so sure of her, because anger and eager hot injustices are
but ways of expressing trust, Martin was irritated by her and
querulous with her as he would not have endured being with
any other woman, any charming Orchid.

He stalked out now and then after a quarrel, disdaining to
answer her, and for hours he left her alone, enjoying the knowl-
edge that he was hurting her, that she was alone, waiting, per-
haps weeping. Because he loved her and also was fond of her,
he was annoyed when she was less sleek, less suave, than the
women he encountered at Angus Duer's.

Mrs. Rouncefield was a worthy old waddler — beside her, Leora
was shining and exquisite. But Mrs. Duer was of amber and
ice. She was a rich young woman, she dressed with distinction,
she spoke with finishing-school mock-melodiousness, she was
ambitious, and she was untroubled by the possession of a heart
or a brain. She was, indeed, what Mrs. Irving Watters believed
herself to be.

In the simple gorgeousness of the Nautilus smart set, Mrs.
Clay Tredgold had petted Leora and laughed at her if she lacked
a shoe-buckle or split an infinitive, but the gold-slippered Mrs.
Duer was accustomed to sneer at carelessness with the most
courteous and unresentable and unmistakable sneers.

As they returned by taxicab from the Duers', Martin flared:

"Don't you ever learn anything? I remember once in Nautilus
we stopped on a country road and talked till — oh, darn' near
dawn, and you were going to be so energetic, but here we are
again tonight, with just the same thing — Good God, couldn't
you even take the trouble to notice that you had a spot of soot
on your nose tonight? Mrs. Duer noticed it, all right! Why are
you so sloppy? Why can't you take a little care? And why can't

284

you make an effort, anyway, to have something to say? You
just sit there at dinner — you just sit and look healthy! Don't
you want to help me? Mrs. Duer will probably help Angus to
become president of the American Medical Association, in about
twenty years, and by that time I suppose you'll have me back
in Dakota as assistant to Hesselink!"

Leora had been snuggling beside him in the unusual luxury
of a taxicab. She sat straight now, and when she spoke she had
lost the casual independence with which she usually regarded
life:

"Dear, I'm awfully sorry. I went out this afternoon, I went
out and had a facial massage, so as to look nice for you, and then
I knew you like conversation, so I got my little book about
modern painting that I bought and I studied it terribly hard,
but tonight I just couldn't seem to get the conversation around
to modern painting — "

He was sobbing, with her head on his shoulder, "Oh, you
poor, scared, bullied kid, trying to be grown-up with these
dollar-chasers!"

in

After the first daze of white tile and bustling cleverness at the
Rouncefield Clinic, Martin had the desire to tie up a few loose
knots of his streptolysin research.

When Angus Duer discovered it he hinted, "Look here, Mar-
tin, I'm glad you're keeping on with your science, but if I were
you I wouldn't, I think, waste too much energy on mere curi-
osity. Dr. Rouncefield was speaking about it the other day. We'd
be glad to have you do all the research you want, only we'd like
it if you went at something practical. Take for instance: if you
could make a tabulation of the blood-counts in a couple of hun-
dred cases of appendicitis and publish it, that'd get somewhere,
and you could sort of bring in a mention of the clinic, and we'd
all receive a little credit — and incidentally maybe we could raise
you to three thousand a year then."

This generosity had the effect of extinguishing Martin's desire
to do any research whatever.

"Angus is right. What he means is: as a scientist I'm finished.
I am. I'll never try to do anything original again."

It was at this time, when Martin had been with the clinic

285

for a year, that his streptolysin paper was published in the
]ournal of Infectious Diseases. He gave reprints to Rouncefield
and to Angus. They said extremely nice things which showed
that they had not read the paper, and again they suggested his
tabulating blood-counts.

He also sent a reprint to Max Gottlieb, at the McGurk Insti-
tute of Biology.

Gottlieb wrote to him, in that dead-black spider-web script:

Dear Martin:

I have read your paper with great pleasure. The curves of the
relation of hemolysin production to age of culture are illuminat-
ing. I have spoken about you to Tubbs. When are you coming
to us — to me? Your laboratory and diener are waiting for you
here. The last thing I want to be is a mystic, but I feel when
1 see your fine engraved letterhead of a clinic and a Rouncefield
that you should be tired of trying to be a good citizen and ready
to come bac\ to wor\. We shall be glad, & Dr. Tubbs, if you can
come.

Truly yours,

M. Gottlieb.

"I'm simply going to adore New York," said Leora.

286

CHAPTER XXVI

THE McGurk Building. A sheer wall, thirty blank stories
of glass and limestone, down in the pinched triangle
whence New York rules a quarter of the world.

Martin was not overwhelmed by his first hint of New York;
after a year in the Chicago Loop, Manhattan seemed leisurely.
But when from the elevated railroad he beheld the Woolworth
Tower, he was exalted. To him architecture had never existed;
buildings were larger or smaller bulks containing more or less
interesting objects. His most impassioned architectural comment
had been, "There's a cute bungalow; be nice place to live." Now
he pondered, "Like to see that tower every day — clouds and
storms behind it and everything — so sort of satisfying."

He came along Cedar Street, among thunderous trucks portly
with wares from all the world; came to the bronze doors of the
McGurk Building and a corridor of intemperately colored terra-
cotta, with murals of Andean Indians, pirates booming up the
Spanish Main, guarded gold-trains, and the stout walls of Carta-
gena. At the Cedar Street end of the corridor, a private street,
one block long, was the Bank of the Andes and Antilles (Ross
McGurk chairman of the board), in whose gold-crusted sanctity
red-headed Yankee exporters drew drafts on Quito, and clerks
hurled breathless Spanish at bulky women. A sign indicated, at
the Liberty Street end, "Passenger Offices, McGurk Line, weekly
sailings for the West Indies and South America."

Born to the prairies, never far from the sight of the cornfields,
Martin was conveyed to blazing lands and portentous enter-
prises.

One of the row of bronze-barred elevators was labeled "Ex-
press to McGurk Institute." He entered it proudly, feeling him-
self already a part of the godly association. They rose swiftly,

287

and he had but half-second glimpses of ground glass doors with
the signs of mining companies, lumber companies, Central
American railroad companies.

The McGurk Institute is probably the only organization for
scientific research in the world which is housed in an office build-
ing. It has the twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories of the McGurk
Building, and the roof is devoted to its animal house and ro tiled
walks along which (above a world of stenographers and book-
keepers and earnest gentlemen who desire to sell Better-bilt
Garments to the golden dons of the Argentine) saunter rapt
scientists dreaming of osmosis in Spirogyra.

Later, Martin was to note that the reception-room of the Insti-
tute was smaller, yet more forbiddingly polite, in its white
paneling and Chippendale chairs, than the lobby of the Rounce-
field Clinic, but now he was unconscious of the room, of the
staccato girl attendant, of everything except that he was about
to see Max Gottlieb, for the first time in five years.

At the door of the laboratory he stared hungrily.

Gottlieb was thin-cheeked and dark as ever, his hawk nose
bony, his fierce eyes demanding, but his hair had gone gray,
the flesh round his mouth was sunken, and Martin could have
wept at the feebleness with which he rose. The old man peered
down at him, his hand on Martin's shoulder, but he said only:

"Ah! Dis is good. . . . Your laboratory is three doors down
the hall. . . . But I object to one thing in the good paper
you send me. You say, 'The regularity of the rate at which
the streptolysin disappears suggests that an equation may be
found — ' "

"But it can, sir!"

"Then why did you not make the equation?"

"Well — I don't know. I wasn't enough of a mathematician."

"Then you should not have published till you knew your
math!"

"I — Look, Dr. Gottlieb, do you really think I know enough
to work here? I want terribly to succeed."

"Succeed? I have heard that word. It is English? Oh, yes, it
is a word that liddle schoolboys use at the University of Winne-
mac. It means passing examinations. But there are no examina*
tions to pass here. . . . Martin, let us be clear. You know some-
thing of laboratory technique; you have heard about dese bacilli;

288

you are not a good chemist, and mathematics — pfui! — most ter-
rible! But you have curiosity and you are stubborn. You do not
accept rules. Therefore I t'ink you will either make a very good
scientist or a very bad one, and if you are bad enough, you will
be popular with the rich ladies who rule this city, New York,
and you can gif lectures for a living or even become, if you get
to be plausible enough, a college president. So anyvay, it will
be interesting."

Half an hour later they were arguing ferociously, Martin as-
serting that the whole world ought to stop warring and trading
and writing and get straightway into laboratories to observe
new phenomena; Gottlieb insisting that there were already too
many facile scientists, that the one thing necessary was the
mathematical analysis (and often the destruction) of phenomena
already observed.

It sounded bellicose, and all the while Martin was blissful
with the certainty that he had come home.

The laboratory in which they talked (Gottlieb pacing the floor,
his long arms fantastically knotted behind his thin back; Martin
leaping on and off tall stools) was not in the least remarkable —
a sink, a bench with racks of numbered test-tubes, a microscope,
a few note-books and hydrogen-ion charts, a grotesque series of
bottles connected by glass and rubber tubes on an ordinary
kitchen table at the end of the room — yet now and then during
his tirades Martin looked about reverently.

Gottlieb interrupted their debate: "What work do you want
to do here?"

"Why, sir, I'd like to help you, if I can. I suppose you're clean-
ing up some things on the synthesis of antibodies."

"Yes, I t'ink I can bring immunity reactions under the mass
action law. But you are not to help me. You are to do your own
work. What do you want to do? This is not a clinic, wit' patients
going through so neat in a row!"

"I want to find a hemolysin for which there's an antibody.
There isn't any for streptolysin. I'd like to work with staphy-
lolysin. Would you mind?"

"I do not care what you do — if you just do not steal my staph
cultures out of the ice-box, and if you will look mysterious all
the time, so Dr. Tubbs, our Director, will t'ink you are up to

289

something big. So! I haf only one suggestion: when you get
stuck in a problem, I have a fine collection of detective stories
in my office. But no. Should I be serious — this once, when you
are just come?

"Perhaps I am a crank, Martin. There are many who hate me.
There are plots against me — oh, you t'ink I imagine it, but you
shall see! I make many mistakes. But one thing I keep always
pure: the religion of a scientist.

"To be a scientist — it is not just a different job, so that a man
should choose between being a scientist and being an explorer
or a bond-salesman or a physician or a king or a farmer. It is a
tangle of ver-y obscure emotions, like mysticism, or wanting to
write poetry; it makes its victim all different from the good
normal man. The normal man, he does not care much what he
does except that he should eat and sleep and make love. But
the scientist is intensely religious — he is so religious that he will
not accept quarter-truths, because they are an insult to his faith.

"He wants that everything should be subject to inexorable
laws. He is equal opposed to the capitalists who t'ink their silly
money-grabbing is a system, and to liberals who t'ink man is
not a fighting animal; he takes both the American booster and
the European aristocrat, and he ignores all their blithering.
Ignores it! All of it! He hates the preachers who talk their fables,
but he iss not too kindly to the anthropologists and historians
who can only make guesses, yet they have the nerf to call them-
selves scientists! Oh, yes, he is a man that all nice good-natured
people should naturally hate!

"He speaks no meaner of the ridiculous faith-healers and chiro-
practors than he does of the doctors that want to snatch our
science before it is tested and rush around hoping they heal
people, and spoiling all the clues with their footsteps; and worse
than the men like hogs, worse than the imbeciles who have not
even heard of science, he hates pseudo-scientists, guess-scientists
— like these psycho-analysts; and worse than those comic dream-
scientists he hates the men that are allowed in a clean kingdom
like biology but know only one text-book and how to lecture to
nincompoops all so popular! He is the only real revolutionary,
the authentic scientist, because he alone knows how liddle he
knows.

290

"He must be heartless. He lives in a cold, clear light. Yet dis
is a funny t'ing: really, in private, he is not cold nor heartless —
so much less cold than the Professional Optimists. The world
has always been ruled by the Philanthropists: by the doctors that
want to use therapeutic methods they do not understand, by the
soldiers that want something to defend their country against, by
the preachers that yearn to make everybody listen to them, by
the kind manufacturers that love their workers, by the eloquent
statesmen and soft-hearted authors — and see once what a fine
mess of hell they haf made of the world! Maybe now it is time
for the scientist, who works and searches and never goes around
howling how he loves everybody!

"But once again always remember that not all the men who
work at science are scientists. So few! The rest — secretaries,
press-agents, camp-followers! To be a scientist is like being a
Goethe: it is born in you. Sometimes I t'ink you have a liddle
of it born in you. If you haf, there is only one t'ing — no, there
is two t'ings you must do: work twice as hard as you can, and
keep people from using you. I will try to protect you from
Success. It is all I can do. So. ... I should wish, Martin, that
you will be very happy here. May Koch bless you!"

ii

Five rapt minutes Martin spent in the laboratory which was
to be his — smallish but efficient, the bench exactly the right
height, a proper sink with pedal taps. When he had closed the
door and let his spirit flow out and fill that minute apartment
with his own essence, he felt secure.

No Pickerbaugh or Rouncefield could burst in here and drag
him away to be explanatory and plausible and public; he would
be free to work, instead of being summoned to the package-
wrapping and dictation of breezy letters which men call work.

He looked out of the broad window above his bench and saw
that he did have the coveted Woolworth Tower, to keep and
gloat on. Shut in to a joy of precision, he would nevertheless
not be walled out from flowing life. He had, to the north, not
the Woolworth Tower alone but the Singer Building, the arro-
gant magnificence of the City Investing Building. To the west,

291

tall ships were riding, tugs were bustling, all the world went by.
Below his cliff, the streets were feverish. Suddenly he loved
humanity as he loved the decent, clean rows of test-tubes, and
he prayed then the prayer of the scientist:

"God give me unclouded eyes and freedom from haste. God
give me a quiet and relentless anger against all pretense and
all pretentious work and all work left slack and unfinished. God
give me a restlessness whereby I may neither sleep nor accept
praise till my observed results equal my calculated results or in
pious glee I discover and assault my error. God give me strength
not to trust to God!"

in

He walked all the way up to their inconsiderable hotel in the
Thirties, and all the way the crowds stared at him — this slim,
pale, black-eyed, beaming young man who thrust among them,
half-running, seeing nothing yet in a blur seeing everything:
gallant buildings, filthy streets, relentless traffic, soldiers of for-
tune, fools, pretty women, frivolous shops, windy sky. His feet
raced to the tune of "I've found my work, I've found my work,
I've found my work!"

Leora was awaiting him — Leora whose fate it was ever to
wait for him in creaky rocking-chairs in cheapish rooms. As he
galloped in she smiled, and all her thin, sweet body was illu-
mined. Before he spoke she cried:

"Oh, Sandy, I'm so glad!"

She interrupted his room-striding panegyrics on Max Gottlieb,
on the McGurk Institute, on New York, on the charms of
staphylolysin, by a meek "Dear, how much are they going to
pay you?"

He stopped with a bump. "Gosh! I forgot to ask!"

"Oh!"

"Now you look here! This isn't a Rouncefield Clinic! I hate
these buzzards that can't see anything but making money — "

"I know, Sandy. Honestly, I don't care. I was just wondering
what kind of a flat we'll be able to afford, so I can begin looking
for it. Go on. Dr. Gottlieb said — "

It was three hours after, at eight, when they went to dinner.

292

IV

The city of magic was to become to Martin neither a city nor
any sort of magic but merely a route: their flat, the subway, the
Institute, a favorite inexpensive restaurant, a few streets of
laundries and delicatessens and movie theaters. But tonight it
was a fog of wonder. They dined at the Brevoort, of which
Gustaf Sondelius had told him. This was in 1916, before the
country had become wholesome and sterile, and the Brevoort
was a tumult of French uniforms, caviar, Louis, dangling neck-
ties, Nuits St. Georges, illustrators, Grand Marnier, British In-
telligence officers, brokers, conversation, and Martell, V.O.

"It's a fine crazy bunch," said Martin. "Do you realize we can
stop being respectable now? Irving Watters isn't watching us, or
Angus! Would we be too insane if we had a bottle of cham-
pagne?"

He awoke next day to fret that there must be a trick some-
where, as there had been in Nautilus, in Chicago. But as he set
to work he seemed to be in a perfect world. The Institute deftly
provided all the material and facilities he could desire — animals,
incubators, glassware, cultures, media — and he had a thoroughly
trained technician — "garcon" they called him at the Institute. He
really was let alone; he really was encouraged to do individual
work; he really was associated with men who thought not in
terms of poetic posters or of two-thousand-dollar operations but
of colloids and sporulation and electrons, and of the laws and
energies which governed them.

On his first day there came to greet him the head of the De'
partment of Physiology, Dr. Rippleton Holabird.

Holabird seemed, though Martin had found his name starred
in physiological journals, too young and too handsome to be
the head of a department: a tall, slim, easy man with a trim
mustache. Martin had been reared in the school of Clif Clawson;
he had not realized, till he heard Dr. Holabird's quick greeting,
that a man's voice may be charming without effeminacy.

Holabird guided him through the two floors of the Institute,
and Martin beheld all the wonders of which he had ever
dreamed. If it was not so large, McGurk ranked in equipment
with Rockefeller, Pasteur, McCormick, Lister. Martin saw rooms
for sterilizing glass and preparing media, for glass-blowing, for

293

the polariscope and the spectroscope, and a steel-and-cement-
walled combustion-chamber. He saw a museum of pathology
and bacteriology to which he longed to add. There was a depart-
ment of publications, whence were issued the Institute reports,
and the American Journal of Geographic Pathology, edited by
the Director, Dr. Tubbs; there was a room for photography, a
glorious library, an aquarium for the Department of Marine
Biology, and (Dr. Tubbs's own idea) a row of laboratories
which visiting foreign scientists were invited to use as their own.
A Belgian biologist and a Portuguese bio-chemist were occupy-
ing guest laboratories now, and once, Martin thrilled to learn,
Gustaf Sondelius had been here.

Then Martin saw the Berkeley-Saunders centrifuge.

The principle of the centrifuge is that of the cream-separator.
It collects as sediment the solids scattered through a liquid, such
as bacteria in a solution. Most centrifuges are hand- or water-
power contrivances the size of a large cocktail-shaker, but this
noble implement was four feet across, electrically driven, the
central bowl enclosed in armor plate fastened with levers like a
submarine hatch, the whole mounted on a cement pillar.

Holabird explained, "ThereV- only three of these in existence.
They're made by Berkeley-Saunders in England. You know the
normal speed, even for a good centrifuge, is about four thousand
revolutions a minute. This does twenty thousand a minute — fast-
est in the world. Eh?"

"Jove, they do give you the stuff to work with!" gloated
Martin. (He really did, under Holabird's handsome influence,
say Jove, not Gosh.)

"Yes, McGurk and Tubbs are the most generous men in the
scientific world. I think you'll find it very pleasant to be here,
Doctor."

"I know I will— shall. And Jove, it's awfully nice of ycu to
take me around this way."

"Can't you see how much I'm enjoying my chance to display
my knowledge? There's no form of egotism so agreeable and
so safe as being a cicerone. But we still have the real wonder
of the Institute for to behold, Doctor. Down this way."

The real wonder of the Institute had nothing visible to do
with science. It was the Hall, in which lunched the staff, and
in which occasional scientific dinners were given, with Mrs.

294

McGurk as hostess. Martin gasped and his head went back as
his glance ran from glistening floor to black and gold ceiling.
The Hall rose the full height of the two floors of the Institute.
Clinging to the soaring wall, above the dais on which lunched
the Director and the seven heads of departments, was a carved
musicians'-gallery. Against the oak paneling of the walls were
portraits of the pontiffs of science, in crimson robes, with a vast
mural by Maxfield Parrish, and above all was an electrolier of a
hundred globes.

"Gosh — ]ovel" said Martin. "I never knew there was such o
room!"

Holabird was generous. He did not smile. "Oh, perhaps it«
almost too gorgeous. It's Capitola's pet creation — Capitola is
Mrs. Ross McGurk, wife of the founder; she's really an awfully
nice woman but she does love Movements and Associations.
Terry Wickett, one of the chemists here, calls this 'Bonanza
Hall.' Yet it does inspire you when you come in to lunch all
tired and grubby. Now let's go call on the Director. He told me
to bring you in."

After the Babylonian splendor of the Hall, Martin expected
to find the office of Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs fashioned like a
Roman bath, but it was, except for a laboratory bench at one
end, the most rigidly business-like apartment he had ever seen.

Dr. Tubbs was an earnest man, whiskered like a terrier, very
scholarly, and perhaps the most powerful American exponent
of co-operation in science, but he was also a man of the world,
fastidious of boots and waistcoats. He had graduated from Har-
vard, studied on the Continent, been professor of pathology in
the University of Minnesota, president of Hartford University,
minister to Venezuela, editor of the Weekly Statesman and pres-
ident of the Sanity League, finally Director of McGurk.

He was a member both of the American Academy of Arts
and Letters and of the Academy of Sciences. Bishops, generals,
liberal rabbis, and musical bankers dined with him. He was one
of the Distinguished Men to whom the newspapers turned for
authoritative interviews on all subjects.

You realized before he had talked to you for ten minutes that
here was one of the few leaders of mankind who could discourse
on any branch of knowledge, yet could control practical affairs
and drive stumbling mankind on to sane and reasonable ideals.

295

Though a Max Gottlieb might in his research show a certain
i:alent, yet his narrowness, his sour and antic humor, 'kept him
from developing the broad view of education, politics, com-
merce, and all other noble matters which marked Dr. A. DeWitt
Tubbs.

But the Director was as cordial to the insignificant Martin
Arrowsmith as though Martin were a visiting senator. He shook
his hand warmly; he unbent in a smile; his baritone was mellow.

"Dr. Arrowsmith, I trust we shall do more than merely say
you are welcome here; I trust we shall show you how welcome
you are! Dr. Gottlieb tells me that you have a natural aptitude
for cloistered investigation but that you have been looking over
the fields of medical practice and public health before you settled
down to the laboratory. I can't tell you how wise I consider you
to have made that broad preliminary survey. Too many would-
be scientists lack the tutored vision which comes from co-
ordinating all mental domains."

Martin was dazed to discover that he had been making a
broad survey.

"Now you'll doubtless wish to take some time, perhaps a year
or more, in getting into your stride, Dr. Arrowsmith. I shan't
ask you for any reports. So long as Dr. Gottlieb feels that you
yourself are satisfied with your progress, I shall be content. Only
if there is anything in which I can advise you, from a perhaps
somewhat longer career in science, please believe that I shall be
delighted to be of aid, and I am quite sure the same obtains
with Dr. Holabird here, though he really ought to be jealous,
because he is one of our youngest workers — in fact I call him
my enfant terrible — but you, I believe, are only thirty-three, and
you quite put the poor fellow's nose out!"

Holabird merrily suggested, "Oh, no, Doctor, it's been put
out long ago. You forget Terry Wickett. He's under forty."

"Oh. Him!" murmured Dr. Tubbs.

Martin had never heard a man disposed of so poisonously
with such politeness. He saw that in Terry Wickett there might
be a serpent even in this paradise.

"Now," said Dr. Tubbs, "perhaps you might like to glance
around my place here. I pride myself on keeping our card-
indices and letter-files as unimaginatively as though I were an
insurance agent. But there is a certain exotic touch in these

296

charts." He trotted across the room to show a nest of narrow
drawers rilled with scientific blue-prints.

Just what they were charts of, he did not say, nor did Martin
ever learn.

He pointed to the bench at the end of the room, and laugh-
ingly admitted:

"You can see there what an inefficient fellow I really am. I
keep asserting that I have given up all the idyllic delights of
pathological research for the less fascinating but so very impor-
tant and fatiguing cares of the directorship. Yet such is the weak-
ness of genus homo that sometimes, when I ought to be attend-
ing to practical details, I become obsessed by some probably
absurd pathological concept, and so ridiculous am I that I can't
wait to hasten down the hall to my regular laboratory — I must
always have a bench at hand and an experiment going on. Oh,
I'm afraid I'm not the moral man that I pose as being in public!
Here I am married to executive procedure, and still I hanker for
my first love, Milady Science!"

"I think it's fine you still have an itch for it," Martin ven
tured.

He was wondering just what experiments Dr. Tubbs had
been doing lately. The bench seemed rather unused.

"And now, Doctor, I want you to meet the real Director of
the Institute — my secretary, Miss Pearl Robbins."

Martin had already noticed Miss Robbins. You could not help
noticing Miss Robbins. She was thirty-five and stately, a creamy
goddess. She rose to shake hands — a firm, competent grasp — and
to cry in her glorious contralto, "Dr. Tubbs is so complimentary
only because he knows that otherwise I wouldn't give him his
afternoon tea. We've heard so much about your cleverness from
Dr. Gottlieb that I'm almost afraid to welcome you, Dr. Arrow-
smith, but I do want to."

Then, in a glow, Martin stood in his laboratory looking at the
Woolworth Tower. He was dizzy with these wonders — his own
wonders, now! In Rippleton Holabird, so gaily elegant yet so
distinguished, he hoped to have a friend. He found Dr. Tubbs
somewhat sentimental, but he was moved by his kindness and
by Miss Robbins's recognition. He was in a haze of future glory
when his door was banged open by a hard-faced, red-headed,
soft-shirted man of thirty-six or -eight.

297

"Arrowsmith?" the intruder growled. "My name is Wickett,
Terry Wickett. I'm a chemist. I'm with Gottlieb. Well, I noticed
the Holy Wren was showing you the menagerie."

"Dr. Holabird?"

"Him. . . . Well, you must be more or less intelligent, if Pa
Gottlieb let you in. How's it starting? Which kind are you going
to be? One of the polite birds that uses the Institute for social
climbing and catches him a rich wife, or one of the roughnecks
like me and Gottlieb?"

Terry Wickett's croak was as irritating a sound as Martin had
ever heard. He answered in a voice curiously like that of Ripple-
ton Holabird:

"I don't think you need to worry. I happen to be married
already!"

"Oh, don't let that fret you, Arrowsmith. Divorces are cheap,
in this man's town. Well, did the Holy Wren show you Gladys
the Tart?"

"Huh?"

"Gladys the Tart, or the Galloping Centrifuge."

"Oh. You mean the Berkeley-Saunders?"

"I do, soul of my soul. Whajuh think of it?"

"It's the finest centrifuge I've ever seen. Dr. Holabird said — "

"Hell, he ought to say something! He went and got old Tubbs
to buy it. He just loves it, Holy Wren does."

"Why not? It's the fastest — "

"Sure. Speediest centrifuge in the whole Vereinigen, and made
of the best toothpick steel. The only trouble is, it always blows
out fuses, and it spatters the bugs so that you need a gas-mask
if you're going to use it. . . . And did you love dear old Tubbsy
and the peerless Pearl?"

"I did!"

"Fine. Of course Tubbs is an illiterate jackass but still, at that,
he hasn't got persecution-mania, like Gottlieb."

"Look here, Wickett — is it Dr. Wickett?"

"Uh-huh. . . . M.D., Ph.D., but a first-rate chemist just the
same."

"Well, Dr. Wickett, it seems to me a shame that a man of
your talents should have to associate with idiots like Gottlieb
and Tubbs and Holabird. I've just left a Chicago clinic where

298

everybody is nice and sensible. I'd be glad to recommend you
for a job there!"

"Wouldn't be so bad. At least I'd avoid all the gassing at
lunch in Bonanza Hall. Well, sorry I got your goat, Arrow-
smith, but you look all right to me."

"Thanks!"

Wickett grinned obscenely — red-headed, rough-faced, wiry—
and snorted, "By the way, did Holabird tell you about being
wounded in the first month of the war, when he was a field
marshal or a hospital orderly or something in the British Army?"

"He did not! He didn't mention the war!"

"He will! Well, Brer Arrowsmith, I look forward to many
happy, happy years together, playing at the feet of Pa Gottlieb.
So long. My lab is right next to yours."

"Fool!" Martin decided, and, "Well, I can stand him as long
as I can fall back on Gottlieb and Holabird. But — The con-
ceited idiot! Gosh, so Holabird was in the war! Invalided out,
I guess. I certainly got back at Wickett on that! 'Did he tell you
about his being a jolly old hero in the blinkin' war?' he said,
and I came right back at him, Tm sorry to displease you,' I said,
'but Dr. Holabird did not mention the war.' The idiot! Well, I
won't let him worry me."

And indeed, as Martin met the staff at lunch, Wickett was
the only one whom he did not find courteous, however brief
their greetings. He did not distinguish among them; for days
most of the twenty researchers remained a blur. He confused
Dr. Yeo, head of the Department of Biology, with the carpenter
who had come to put up shelves.

The staff sat in Hall at two long tables, one on the dais, one
belcw: tiny insect groups under the massy ceiling. They were
not particularly noble of aspect, these possible Darwins and
Huxleys and Pasteurs. None of them were wide-browed Platos.
Except for Rippleton Holabird and Max Gottlieb and perhaps
Martin himself, they looked like lunching grocers: brisk feature-
less young men; thick mustached elders; and wimpish little
men with spectacles, men whose collars did not meet. But there
was a steady calm about them; there was, Martin believed, no
anxiety over money in their voices nor any restlessness of envy
and scandalous gossip. They talked gravely or frivolously of their
work, the one sort of work that, since it becomes part of the

299

chain of discovered fact, is eternal, however forgotten the work-
er's name.

As Martin listened to Terry Wickett (rude and slangy as ever,
referring to himself as "the boy chemist," speaking of "this
gaudy Institute" and "our trusting new HI brother, Arrow-
smith") debating with a slight thin-bearded man — Dr. William
T. Smith, assistant in bio-chemistry — the possibility of increasing
the effects of all enzymes by doses of X-rays, as he heard one
associate-member vituperate another for his notions of cell-
chemistry and denounce Ehrlich as "the Edison of medical sci-
ence," Martin perceived new avenues of exciting research; he
stood on a mountain, and unknown valleys, craggy tantalizing
paths, were open to his feet.

Dr. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird invited them to dinner, a
week after their coming.

As Holabird's tweeds made Clay Tredgold's smartness seem
hard and pretentious, so his dinner revealed Angus Duer's affairs
in Chicago as mechanical and joyless and a little anxious. Every-
one whom Martin met at the Holabirds' flat was a Somebody,
though perhaps a minor Somebody: a goodish editor or a rising
ethnologist; and all of them had Holabird's graceful casualness.

The provincial Arrowsmiths arrived on time, therefore fifteen
minutes early. Before the cocktails appeared, in old Venetian
glass, Martin demanded, "Doctor, what problems are you get-
ting after now in your physiology?"

Holabird was transformed into an ardent boy. With a depreca-
tory "Would you really like to hear about 'em — you needn't be
polite, you know!" he dashed into an exposition of his experi-
ments, drawing sketches on the blank spaces in newspaper ad-
vertisements, on the back of a wedding invitation, on the fly-
leaf of a presentation novel, looking at Martin apologetically,
learned yet gay.

"We're working on the localization of brain functions. I think
we've gone beyond Bolton and Flechsig. Oh, it's jolly exciting,
exploring the brain. Look here!"

His swift pencil was sketching the cerebrum; the brain lived
and beat under his fingers.

300

He threw down the paper. "I say, it's a shame to inflict my
hobbies on you. Besides, the others are coming. Tell me, how
is your work going? Are you comfortable at the Institute? Do
you find you like people?"

"Everybody except — To be frank, I'm jarred by Wickett."

Generously, "I know. His manner is slightly aggressive. But
you mustn't mind him; he's really an extraordinarily gifted bio-
chemist. He's a bachelor — gives up everything for his work. A nd
he doesn't really mean half the rude things he says. He decests
me, among others. Has he mentioned me?"

"Why, not especially — "

"I have a feeling he goes around saying that I talk about my
experiences in the war, which really isn't quite altogether true."

"Yes," in a burst, "he did say that."

"I do rather wish he wouldn't. So sorry to have ofTended hi .r
by going and getting wounded. I'll remember and not do 1.
again! Such a fuss for a war record as insignificant as mine!
What happened was: when the war broke out in '14 I was in
England, studying under Sherrington. I pretended to be z
Canadian and joined up with the medical corps and got mine
within three weeks and got hoofed out, and that was the end
of my magnificent career! Here's somebody arriving."

His easy gallantry won Martin complete. Leora was equally-
captivated by Mrs. Holabird, and they went home from the
dinner in new enchantment.

So began for them a white light of happiness. Martin was
scarce more blissful in his undisturbed work than in his life
outside the laboratory.

All the first week he forgot to ask what his salary was to be.
Then it became a game to wait till the end of the month. Eve-
nings, in little restaurants, Leora and he would speculate about it.

The Institute would surely not pay him less than the twenty-
five hundred dollars a year he had received at the Rouncefield
Clinic, but on evenings when he was tired it dropped to fifteen
hundred, and one evening when they had Burgundy he raised
it to thirty-five hundred.

When his first monthly check came, neat in a little sealed
envelope, he dared not look at it. He took it home to Leora.
In their hotel room they stared at the envelope as though it was
likely to contain poison. Martin opened it shakily; he stared,

301

and whispered, "Oh, those decent people! They're paying me —
this is for four hundred and twenty dollars — they're paying me
five thousand a year!"

Mrs. Holabird, a white kitten of a woman, helped Leora find
a three-room flat with a spacious living-room, in an old house
near Gramercy Park, and helped her furnish it with good bits,
second-hand. When Martin was permitted to look he cried, "I
hope we stay here for fifty years!"

This was the Grecian isle where they found peace. Presently
they had friends: the Holabirds, Dr. Billy Smith — the thin-
bearded bio-chemist, who had an intelligent taste in music and
German beer — an anatomist whom Martin met at a Winnemac
alumni dinner, and always Max Gottlieb.

Gottlieb had found his own serenity. In the Seventies he had
a brown small flat, smelling of tobacco and leather books. His
son Robert had graduated from City College and gone bustlingly
into business. Miriam kept up her music while she guarded her
father — a dumpling of a girl, holy fire behind the deceptive flesh.
After an evening of Gottlieb's acrid doubting, Martin was in-
spired to hasten to the laboratory and attempt a thousand new
queries into the laws of micro-organisms, a task which usually
began with blasphemously destroying all the work he had
recently done.

Even Terry Wickett became more tolerable. Martin perceived
that Wickett's snarls were partly a Clif Clawson misconception
of humor, but partly a resentment, as great as Gottlieb's, of the
morphological scientists who ticket things with the nicest little
tickets, who name things and rename them and never analyze
them. Wickett often worked all night; he was to be seen in shirt-
sleeves, his sulky red hair rumpled, sitting with a stop-watch
before a constant temperature bath for hours. Now and then
it was a relief to have the surly intentness of Wickett instead
Df the elegance of Rippleton Holabird, which demanded from
Martin so much painful elegance in turn, at a time when he
was sunk beyond sounding in his experimentation.

302

CHAPTER XXVII

HIS work began fumblingly. There were da\s when, for
all the joy of it, he dreaded lest Tubbs stride in and
bellow, "What are you doing here? You're the wrong
Arrowsmith! Get out!"

He had isolated twenty strains of staphylococcus germs and
he was testing them to discover which of them was most active
in producing a hemolytic, a blood-disintegrating toxin, so that he
might produce an antitoxin.

There were picturesque moments when, after centrifuging,
the organisms lay in coiling cloudy masses at the bottoms of the
tubes; or when the red corpuscles were completely dissolved and
the opaque brick-red liquid turned to the color of pale wine.
But most of the processes were incomparably tedious: removing
samples of the culture every six hours, making salt suspensions
of corpuscles in small tubes, recording the results.

He never knew they were tedious.

Tubbs came in now and then, found him busy, patted his
shoulder, said something which sounded like French and might
even have been French, and gave vague encouragement; while
Gottlieb imperturbably told him to go ahead, and now and then
stirred him by showing his own note-books (they were full of
figures and abbreviations, stupid-seeming as invoices of calico)
or by speaking of his own work, in a vocabulary as heathenish
as Tibetan magic:

"Arrhenius and Madsen have made a contribution toward
bringing immunity reactions under the mass action law, but I
hope to show that antigen-antibody combinations occur in
stoicheiometric proportions when certain variables are held con
stant."

"Oh, yes, I see," said Martin; and to himself: "Well, I dare"

303

near a quarter understand that! Oh, Lord, if they'll only give
me a little time and not send me back to tacking up diphtheria
posters!"

When he had obtained a satisfactory toxin, Martin began his
effort to find an antitoxin. He made vast experiments with no
results. Sometimes he was certain that he had something, but
when he rechecked his experiments he was bleakly certain that
he hadn't. Once he rushed into Gottlieb's laboratory with the
announcement of the antitoxin, whereupon with affection and
several discomforting questions and the present of a box of real
Egyptian cigarettes, Gottlieb showed him that he had not con-
sidered certain dilutions.

With all his amateurish fumbling, Martin had one character-
istic without which there can be no science: a wide-ranging,
sniffing, snuffling, undignified, unself-dramatizing curiosity, and
it drove him on.

While he puttered his insignificant way through the early
years of the Great European War, the McGurk Institute had a
lively existence under its placid surface.

Martin may not have learned much in the matter of antibodies
but he did learn the secret cf the Institute, and he saw that
behind all its quiet industriousness was Capitola McGurk, the
Great White Uplifter.

Capitola, Mrs. Ross McGurk, had been opposed to woman
suffrage — until she learned that women were certain to get the
vote — but she was a complete controller of virtuous affairs. Ross
McGurk had bought the Institute not only to glorify himself
but to divert Capitola and keep her itching fingers out of his
shipping and mining and lumber interests, which would not too
well have borne the investigations of a Great White Uplifter.

Ross McGurk was at the time a man of fifty-four, second gen-
eration of California railroad men; a graduate of Yale; big,
suave, dignified, cheerful, unscrupulous. Even in 1908, when he
had founded the Institute, he had had too many houses, too
many servants, too much food, and no children, because Capitola
considered "that sort of thing detrimental to women with large
responsibilities." In the Institute he found each year more satis-
faction, more excuse for having lived.

304

When Gottlieb arrived,* McGurk went up to look him over.
McGurk had bullied Dr. Tubbs now and then; Tubbs was com-
pelled to scurry to his office as though he were a messenger boy;
yet when he saw the saturnine eyes of Gottlieb, McGurk looked
interested; and the two men, the bulky, clothes-conscious, pow-
erful, reticent American and the cynical, simple, power-despising
European, became friends. McGurk would slip away from a
conference affecting the commerce of a whole West Indian
island to sit on a high stool, silent, and watch Gottlieb work.

"Some day when I quit hustling and wake up, I'm going to
become your garcon, Max," said McGurk, and Gottlieb answered,
"I don't know — you haf imagination, Ross, but I t'ink you are
too late to get a training in reality. Now if you do not mind
eating at Childs's, we will avoid your very expostulatory Regal
Hall, and I shall invite you to lunch."

But Capitola did not join their communion.

Gottlieb's arrogance had returned, and with Capitola McGurk
he needed it. She had such interesting little problems for her
husband's pensioners to attack. Once, in excitement, she visited
Gottlieb's laboratory to tell him that large numbers of persons
die of cancer, and why didn't he drop this anti-whatever-it-was
and find a cure for cancer, which would be ever so nice for all
of them.

But her real grievance arose when, after Rippleton Holabird
had agreed to give midnight supper on the roof of the Institute
to one of her most intellectual dinner-parties, she telephoned to
Gottlieb, merely asking, "Would it be too much trouble for you
to go down and open your lab, so we can all enjoy just a tiny
peep at it?" and he answered:

"It would! Good night!"

Capitola protested to her husband. He listened — at least he
seemed to listen — and remarked:

"Cap, I don't mind your playing the fool with the footmen.
They've got to stand it. But if you get funny with Max, I'll
simply shut up the whole Institute, and then you won't have
anything to talk about at the Colony Club. And it certainly does
beat the deuce that a man worth thirty million dollars — at least
a fellow that's got that much — can't find a clean pair of pajamas.
No, I wont have a valet! Oh, please now, Capitola, please quit
being high-minded and let me go to sleep, will you!"

305

But Capitola was uncontrollable, especially in the matter of
the monthly dinners which she gave at the Institute.

in

The first of the McGurk Scientific Dinners which Martin and
Leora witnessed was a particularly important and explanatory
dinner, because the guest of honor was Major-General Sir Isaac
Mallard, the London surgeon, who was in America with a
British War Mission. He had already beautifully let himself be
shown through the Institute; he had been Sir Isaac'd by Dr.
Tubbs and every researcher except Terry Wickett; he remem-
bered meeting Rippleton Holabird in London, or said he re-
membered; and he admired Gladys the Centrifuge.

The dinner began with one misfortune in that Terry Wickett,
who hitherto could be depended upon to stay decently away,
now appeared, volunteering to the wife of an ex-ambassador,
"I simply couldn't duck this spread, with dear Sir Isaac coming.
Say, if I hadn't told you, you wouldn't hardly think my dress-
suit was rented, would you! Have you noticed that Sir Isaac is
getting so he doesn't tear the carpet with his spurs any more?
I wonder if he still kills all his mastoid patients?"

There was vast music, vaster food; there were uncomfortable
scientists explaining to golden cooing ladies, in a few words, just
what they were up to and what in the next twenty years they
hoped to be up to; there were the cooing ladies themselves; ob-
serving in tones of pretty rebuke, "But I'm afraid you haven't
yet made it as clear as you might." There were the cooing ladies'
husbands — college graduates, manipulators of oil stocks or of
corporation law — who sat ready to give to anybody who desired
it their opinion that while antitoxins might be racy, what we
really needed was a good substitute for rubber.

There was Rippleton Holabird, being charming.

And in the pause of the music, there suddenly was Terry
Wickett, saying to quite an important woman, one of Capitola's
most useful friends, "Yes, his name is spelled G-o-t-t-l-i-e-b but
it's pronounced Gottdamn."

But such outsiders as Wickett and such silent riders as Martin
and Leora and such totally absent members as Max Gottlieb
were few, and the dinner waxed magnificently to a love-feast

306

when Dr. Tubbs and Sir Isaac Mallard paid compliments to
each other, to Capitola, to the sacred soil of France, to brave
little Belgium, to American hospitality, to British love of privacy,
and to the extremely interesting things a young man with a
sense of co-operation might do in modern science.

The guests were conducted through the Institute. They in-
spected the marine biology aquarium, the pathological museum,
and the animal house, at sight of which one sprightly lady de-
manded of Wickett, "Oh, the poor little guinea pigs and darling
rabbicks! Now honestly, Doctor, don't you think it would be
ever so much nicer if you let them go free, and just worked with
your test-tubes?"

A popular physician, whose practice was among rich women,
none of them west of Fifth Avenue, said to the sprightly lady,
"I think you're absolutely right. I never have to kill any poor
wee little beasties to get my knowledge!"

With astounding suddenness Wickett took his hat and went
away.

The sprightly lady said, "You see, he didn't dare stand up to
a real argument. Oh, Dr. Arrowsmith, of course I know how
wonderful Ross McGurk and Dr. Tubbs and all of you are, but
I must say I'm disappointed in your laboratories. I'd expected
there'd be such larky retorts and electric furnaces and everything
but, honestly, I don't see a single thing that's interesting, and
I do think all you clever people ought to do something for us,
now that you've coaxed us all the way down here. Can't you or
somebody create life out of turtle eggs, or whatever it is? Oh,
please do! Pretty please! Or at least, do put on one of these
cunnin' dentist coats that you wear."

Then Martin also went rapidly away, accompanied by a furi-
ous Leora, who in the taxicab announced that she had desired
to taste the champagne-cup which she had observed on the buf-
fet, and that her husband was little short of a fool.

IV

Thus, however satisfying his work, Martin began to wonder
about the perfection of his sanctuary; to wonder why Gottlieb
should be so insulting at lunch to neat Dr. Sholtheis, the indus-
trious head of the Department of Epidemiology, and why Dr.

307

Sholtheis should endure the insults; to wonder why Dr. Tubbs,
when he wandered into one's laboratory, should gurgle, "The
one thing for you to keep in view in all your work is the ideal
of co-operation"; to wonder why so ardent a physiologist as
Rippleton Holabird should all day long be heard conferring with
Tubbs instead of sweating at his bench.

Holabird had, five years before, done one bit of research
which had taken his name into scientific journals throughout
the world: he had studied the effect of the extirpation of the
anterior lobes of a dog's brain on its ability to find its way
through the laboratory. Martin had read of that research before
he had thought of going to McGurk; on his arrival he was
thrilled to have it chronicled by the master himself; but when
he had heard Holabird refer to it a dozen times he was consid-
erably less thrilled, and he speculated whether all his life Hola-
bird would go on being "the man — you remember — the chap
that did the big stunt, whatever it was, with locomotion in dogs
or something."

Martin speculated still more as he perceived that all his col-
leagues were secretly grouped in factions.

Tubbs, Holabird, and perhaps Tubbs's secretary, Pearl Rob-
bins, were the ruling caste. It was murmured that Holabird
hoped some day to be made Assistant Director, an office which
was to be created for him. Gottlieb, Terry Wickett, and Dr.
Nicholas Yeo, that long-mustached and rustic biologist whom
Martin had first taken for a carpenter, formed an independent
faction of their own, and however much he disliked the boister-
ous Wickett, Martin was dragged into it.

Dr. William Smith, with his little beard and a notion of mush-
rooms formed in Paris, kept to himself. Dr. Sholtheis, who had
been born to a synagogue in Russia but who was now the most
zealous high-church Episcopalian in Yonkers, was constantly in
his polite small way trying to have his scientific work com-
mended by Gottlieb. In the Department of Bio-Physics, the good-
natured chief was reviled and envied by his own assistant. And
in the whole Institute there was not one man who would, in all
states of liquor, assert that the work of any other scientist any-
where was completely sound, or that there was a single one of
his rivals who had not stolen ideas from him. No rocking-chair
clique on a summer-hotel porch, no knot of actors, ever whis-

308

pered more scandal or hinted more warmly of complete idiocy
in their confreres than did these uplifted scientists.

But these discoveries Martin could shut out by closing his
door, and he had that to do now which deafened him to the
mutters of intrigue.

For once Gottlieb did not amble into his laboratory but curtly
summoned him. In a corner of Gottlieb's office, a den opening
from his laboratory, was Terry Wickett, rolling a cigarette and
looking sardonic.

Gottlieb observed, "Martin, I haf taken the privilege of talk-
ing you over with Terry, and we concluded that you haf done
well enough now so it is time you stop puttering and go to
work."

"I thought I was working, sir!"

All the wide placidness of his halcyon days was gone; he saw
himself driven back to Pickerbaughism.

Wickett intruded, "No, you haven't. You've just been show
ing that you're a bright boy who might work if he only knew
something."

While Martin turned on Wickett with a "Who the devil are
you?" expression, Gottlieb went on:

"The fact is, Martin, you can do nothing till you know a
little mathematics. If you are not going to be a cookbook bac-
teriologist, like most of them, you must be able to handle some
of the fundamentals of science. All living things are physico-
chemical machines. Then how can you make progress if you
do not know physical chemistry, and how can you know physi-
cal chemistry without much mathematics?"

"Yuh," said Wickett, "you're lawn-mowing and daisy-picking,
not digging."

Martin faced them. "But rats, Wickett, a man can't know
everything. I'm a bacteriologist, not a physicist. Strikes me a
fellow ought to use his insight, not just a chest of tools, to make
discoveries. A good sailor could find his way at sea even if he
didn't have instruments, and a whole Lusitania-ixA of junk
wouldn't make a good sailor out of a dub. Man ought to develop
his brain, not depend on tools."

309

"Ye-uh, but if there were charts and quadrants in existence,
a sailor that cruised off without 'em would be a chump!"

For half an hour Martin defended himself, not too politely,
before the gem-like Gottlieb, the granite Wickett. All the while
he knew that he was sickeningly ignorant.

They ceased to take interest. Gottlieb was looking at his note-
books, Wickett was clumping off to work. Martin glared at
Gottlieb. The man meant so much that he could be furious with
him as he would have been with Leora, with his own self.

"I'm sorry you think I don't know anything," he raged, and
departed with the finest dramatic violence. He slammed into
his own laboratory, felt freed, then wretched. Without volition,
like a drunken man, he stormed to Wickett's room, protesting,
"I suppose you're right. My physical chemistry is nix, and my
math rotten. What am I going to do — what am I going to do?"

The embarrassed barbarian grumbled, "Well, for Pete's sake,
Slim, don't worry. The old man and I were just egging you on.
Fact is, he's tickled to death about the careful way you're start-
ing in. About the math — probably you're better off than the
Holy Wren and Tubbs right now; you've forgotten all the
math you ever knew, and they never knew any. Gosh all fish-
hooks! Science is supposed to mean Knowledge — from the
Greek, a handsome language spoken by the good old booze-
hoisting Hellenes — and the way most of the science boys resent
having to stop writing little jeweled papers or giving teas and
sweat at getting some knowledge certainly does make me a
grand booster for the human race. My own math isn't any too
good, Slim, but if you'd like to have me come around evenings
and tutor you — Free, I mean!"

Thus began the friendship between Martin and Terry Wickett;
thus began a change in Martin's life whereby he gave up three
or four hours of wholesome sleep each night to grind over
matters which everyone is assumed to know, and almost every-
one does not know.

He took up algebra; found that he had forgotten most of it;
cursed over the competition of the indefatigable A and the in-
dolent B who walk from Y to Z; hired a Columbia tutor; and
finished the subject, with a spurt of something like interest in
regard to quadratic equations, in six weeks . . . while Leora

310

listened, watched, waited, made sandwiches, and laughed at the
tutor's jokes.

By the end of his first nine months at McGurk, Martin had
reviewed trigonometry and analytic geometry and he was find-
ing differential calculus romantic. But he made the mistake of
telling Terry Wickett how much he knew.

Terry croaked, "Don't trust math too much, son," and he so
confused him with references to the thermo-dynamical deriva-
tion of the mass action law, and to the oxidation reduction po-
tential, that he stumbled again into raging humility, again saw
himself an impostor and a tenth-rater.

He read the classics of physical science: Copernicus and Gali-
leo, Lavoisier, Newton, LaPlace, Descartes, Faraday. He became
completely bogged in Newton's "Fluxions"; he spoke of Newton
to Tubbs and found that the illustrious Director knew nothing
about him. He cheerfully mentioned this to Terry, and was
shockingly cursed for his conceit as a "nouveau cultured," as a
"typical enthusiastic convert," and so returned to the work whose
end is satisfying because there is never an end.

His life did not seem edifying nor in any degree amusing.
When Tubbs peeped into his laboratory he found a humorless
young man going about his tests of hemolytic toxins with no
apparent flair for the Real Big Thing in Science, which war
co-operation and being efficient. Tubbs tried to set him straight
with "Are you quite sure you're following a regular demarked
line in your work?"

It was Leora who bore the real tedium.

She sat quiet (a frail child, only up to one's shoulder, not nine
minutes older than at marriage, nine years before), or she
napped inoffensively, in the long living-room of their flat, while
he worked over his dreary digit-infested books till one, till two,
and she politely awoke to let him worry at her, "But look here
now, I've got to keep up my research at the same time. God, I
am so tired!"

She dragged him away for an illegal five-day walk on Cape
Cod, in March. He sat between the Twin Lights at Chatham,
and fumed, "I'm going back and tell Terry and Gottlieb they
can go to the devil with their crazy physical chemistry. I've b.d(\
enough, now I've done math," and she commented, "Yes, I <-er-

311

tainly would — though isn't it funny how Dr. Gottlieb always
seems to be right?"

He was so absorbed in staphylolysin and in calculus that he
did not realize the world was about to be made safe for democ-
racy. He was a little dazed when America entered the war.

VI

Dr. Tubbs dashed to Washington to offer the services of the
Institute to the War Department.

All the members of the staff, except Gottlieb and two others
who declined to be so honored, were made officers and told to
run out and buy nice uniforms.

Tubbs became a Colonel, Rippleton Holabird a Major, Martin
and Wickett and Billy Smith were Captains. But the garcons
had no military rank whatever, nor any military duties except
the polishing of brown riding-boots and leather puttees, which
the several warriors wore as pleased their fancies or their legs.
And the most belligerent of all, Miss Pearl Robbins, she who at
tea heroically slaughtered not only German men but all their
women and viperine children, was wickedly unrecognized and
had to make up a uniform for herself.

The only one of them who got nearer to the front than Liberty
Street was Terry Wickett, who suddenly asked for leave, was
transferred to the artillery, and sailed off" to France.

He apologized to Martin: "I'm ashamed of chucking my work
like this, and I certainly don't want to kill Germans — I mean not
any more'n I want to kill most people — but I never could resist
getting into a big show. Say, Slim, keep an eye on Pa Gottlieb,
will you? This has hit him bad. He's got a bunch of nephews
and so on in the German army, and the patriots like Big Foot
Pearl will give an exhibit of idealism by persecuting him. So
long, Slim, take care y'self."

Martin had vaguely protested at being herded into the army.
The war was to him chiefly another interruption to his work,
like Pickerbaughism, like earning his living at Wheatsylvania.
But when he had gone strutting forth in uniform, it was so en-
joyable that for several weeks he was a standard patriot. He had
never looked so well, so taut and erect, as in khaki. It was en-
chanting to be saluted by privates, quite as enchanting to return

312

the salute in the dignified, patronizing, all-comrades-together
splendor which Martin shared with the other doctors, professors,
lawyers, brokers, authors, and former socialist intellectuals who
were his fellow-officers.

But in a month the pleasures of being a hero became mechani-
cal, and Martin longed for soft shirts, easy shoes, and clothes
with reasonable pockets. His puttees were a nuisance to wear
and an inferno to put on; his collar pinched his neck and
jabbed his chin; and it was wearing on a man who sat up till
three, on the perilous duty of studying calculus, to be snappy
at every salute.

Under the martinet eye of Col. Director Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs
he had to wear his uniform, at least recognizable portions of it,
at the Institute, but by evening he slipped into the habit of sneak-
ing into citizen clothes, and when he went with Leora to the
movies he had an agreeable feeling of being Absent Without
Leave, of risking at every street corner arrest by the Military
Police and execution at dawn.

Unfortunately no M.P. ever looked at him. But one evening
when in an estimable and innocent manner he was looking at
the remains of a gunman who had just been murdered by an-
other gunman, he realized that Major Rippleton Holabird was
standing by, glaring. For once the Major was unpleasant:

"Captain, does it seem to you that this is quite playing the
game, to wear mufti? We, unfortunately, with our scientific
work, haven't the privilege of joining the Boys who are up
against the real thing, but we are under orders just as if we
were in the trenches — where some of us would so much like to
be again! Captain, I trust I shall never again see you breaking
the order about being in uniform, or — uh — "

Martin blurted to Leora, later:

"I'm sick of hearing about his being wounded. Nothing that
I can see to prevent his going back to the trenches. Wound's all
right now. I want to be patriotic, but my patriotism is chasing
antitoxins, doing my job, not wearing a particular kind of pants
and a particular set of ideas about the Germans. Mind you, I'm
anti-German all right — I think they're probably just as bad as
we are. Oh, let's go back and do some more calculus. . . . Dar-
ling, my working nights doesn't bore you too much, does it?"

3*3

Leora had cunning. When she could not be enthusiastic, she
could be unannoyingly silent.

At the Institute Martin perceived that he was not the only
defender of his country who was not comfortable in the garb
of heroes. The most dismal of the staff-members was Dr. Nich-
olas Yeo, the Yankee sandy-mustached head of the Department
of Biology.

Yeo had put on Major's uniform, but he never felt neighborly
with it. (He knew he was a Major, because Col. Dr. Tubbs
had told him he was, and he knew that this was a Major's uni-
form, because the clothing salesman said so.) He walked out
of the McGurk Building in a melancholy, deprecatory way, with
one breeches leg bulging over his riding-boots; and however
piously he tried, he never remembered to button his blouse over
the violet-flowered shirts which, he often confided, you could
buy ever so cheap on Eighth Avenue.

But Major Dr. Yeo had one military triumph. He hoarsely
explained to Martin, as they were marching to the completely
militarized dining-hall:

"Say, Arrowsmith, do you ever get balled up about this salut-
ing? Darn it, I never can figure out what all these insignia mean.
One time I took a Salvation Army Lieutenant for a Y.M.C.A.
General, or maybe he was a Portygee. But I've got the idea
now!" Yeo laid his finger beside his large nose, and produced
wisdom: "Whenever I see any fellow in uniform that looks
older than I am, I salute him — my nephew, Ted, has drilled me
so I salute swell now — and if he don't salute back, well, Lord,
I just think about my work and don't fuss. If you look at it
scientifically, this military life isn't so awful' hard after all!"

VII

Always, in Paris or in Bonn, Max Gottlieb had looked to
America as a land which, in its freedom from Royalist tradition,
in its contact with the realities of cornfields and blizzards and
town-meetings, had set its face against the puerile pride of war.
He believed that he had ceased to be a German, now, and be-
come a countryman of Lincoln.

The European War was the one thing, besides his discharge
trom Winnemac, which had ever broken his sardonic serenity.

3M

In the war he could see no splendor nor hope, but only crawling
tragedy. He treasured his months of work and good talk in
France, in England, in Italy; he loved his French and English
and Italian friends as he loved his ancient Korpsbri'ider, and very
well indeed beneath his mocking did he love the Germans with
whom he had drudged and drunk.

His sis:ei's sons — on home-craving vacations he had seen
them, in babyhood, in boyhood, in ruffling youngmanhood —
went out with the Kaiser's colors in 1914; one of them became
an Oberst, much decorated, one existed insignificantly, and one
was dead and stinking in ten days. This he sadly endured, as
later he endured his son Robert's going out as an American
lieutenant, to fight his own cousins. What struck down this man
to whom abstractions and scientific laws were more than kindly
flesh was the mania of hate which overcame the unmilitaristic
America to which he had emigrated in protest against Junker-
dom.

Incredulously he perceived women asserting that all Germans
were baby-killers, universities barring the language of Heine,
orchestras outlawing the music of Beethoven, professors in uni-
form bellowing at clerks, and the clerks never protesting.

It is uncertain whether the real hurt was to his love for Amer-
ica or to his egotism, that he should have guessed so grotesquely;
it is curious that he who had so denounced the machine-made
education of the land should yet have been surprised when it
turned blithely to the old, old, mechanical mockeries of war.

When the Institute sanctified the war, he found himself re-
garded not as the great and impersonal immunologist but as a
suspect German Jew.

True, the Terry who went off to the artillery did not look
upon him dourly, but Major Rippleton Holabird became erect
and stiff when they passed in the corridor. When Gottlieb in-
sisted to Tubbs at lunch, "I am villing to admit every virtue of
the French — I am very fond of that so individual people — but
on the theory of probabilities I suggest that there must be some
good Germans out of sixty millions," then Col. Dr. Tubbs com-
manded, "In this time of world tragedy, it does not seem to me
particularly becoming to try to be flippant, Dr. Gottlieb!"

In shops and on the elevated trains, little red-faced sweaty
people when they heard his accent glared at him, and growled

315

one to another, "There's one of them damn' barb'rous well-
poisoning Huns!" and however contemptuous he might be, how-
ever much he strove for ignoring pride, their nibbling reduced
him from arrogant scientist to an insecure, raw-nerved, shrink-
ing old man.

And once a hostess who of old time had been proud to know
him, a hostess whose maiden name was Straufnabel and who
had married into the famous old Anglican family of Rosemont,
when Gottlieb bade her "Auf Wiedersehen" cried out upon him,
"Dr. Gottlieb, I'm very sorry, but the use of that disgusting
language is not permitted in this house!"

He had almost recovered from the anxieties of Winnemac and
the Hunziker factory; he had begun to expand, to entertain
people — scientists, musicians, talkers. Now he was thrust back
into himself. With Terry gone, he trusted only Miriam and
Martin and Ross McGurk; and his deep-set wrinkle-lidded eyes
looked ever on sadness.

But he could still be tart. He suggested that Capitola ought to
have in the window of her house a Service Flag with a star for
every person at the Institute who had put on uniform.

She took it quite seriously, and did it.

VIII

The military duties of the McGurk staff did not consist en-
tirely in wearing uniforms, receiving salutes, and listening to
Col. Dr. Tubbs's luncheon lectures on "the part America will
inevitably play in the reconstruction of a Democratic Europe."

They prepared sera; the assistant in the Department of Bio-
Physics was inventing electrified wire entanglements; Dr. Billy
Smith, who six months before had been singing Student Lieder
at Liichow's, was working on poison gas to be used against all
singers of Lieder; and to Martin was assigned the manufacture
of lipovaccine, a suspension of finely ground typhoid and para-
typhoid organisms in oil. It was a greasy job, and dull. Martin
was faithful enough about it, and gave to it almost every morn-
ing, but he blasphemed more than usual and he unholily wel-
comed scientific papers in which lipovaccines were condemned
as inferior to ordinary salt solutions.

316

He was conscious of Gottlieb's sorrowing and tried to comfort
him.

It was Martin's most pitiful fault that he was not very kind
to shy people and lonely people and stupid old people; he was
not cruel to them, he simply was unconscious of them or so
impatient of their fumbling that he avoided them. Whenever
Leora taxed him with it he grumbled:

"Well, but — I'm too much absorbed in my work, or in doping
stuff" out, to waste time on morons. And it's a good thing. Most
people above the grade of hog do so much chasing around after
a lot of vague philanthropy that they never get anything done —
and most of your confounded shy people get spiritually pauper-
ized. Oh, it's so much easier to be good-natured and purring
and self-congratulatory and generally footless than it is to pound
ahead and keep yourself strictly for your own work, the work
that gets somewhere. Very few people have the courage to be
decently selfish — not answer letters — and demand the right to
work. If they had their way, these sentimentalists would've had
a Newton — yes, or probably a Christ! — giving up everything
they did for the world to address meetings and listen to the
troubles of cranky old maids. Nothing takes so much courage
as to keep hard and clear-headed."

And he hadn't even that courage.

When Leora had made complaint, he would be forcibly kind
to all sorts of alarmed stray beggars for a day or two, then drift
back into his absorption. There were but two people whose un-
happiness could always pierce him: Leora and Gottlieb.

Though he was busier than he had known anyone could ever
be, with lipovaccines in the morning, physical chemistry in the
evening and, at all sorts of intense hours between, the continua-
tion of his staphylolysin research, he gave what time he could
to seeking out Gottlieb and warming his vanity by reverent
listening.

Then his research wiped out everything else, made him forget
Gottlieb and Leora and all his briskness about studying, made
him turn his war work over to others, and confounded night
and day in one insane flaming blur as he realized chat he had
something not unworthy of a Gottlieb, something at the mys-
terious source of life.

317

CHAPTER XXVIII

CAPTAIN MARTIN ARROWSM1TH, M.R.C., came
home to his good wife Leora, wailing, "I'm so rotten
tired, and I feel kind of discouraged. I haven't accom-
plished a darn' thing in this whole year at McGurk. Sterile. No
good. And I'm hanged if I'll study calculus this evening. Let's
go to the movies. Won't even change to regular human clothes.
Too tired."

"All right, honey," said Leora. "But let's have dinner here.
I bought a wonderful ole fish this afternoon."

Through the film Martin gave his opinion, as a captain and
as a doctor, that it seemed improbable a mother should not
know her daughter after an absence of ten years. He was restless
and rational, which is not a mood in which to view the cinema.
When they came blinking out of that darkness lit only from
the shadowy screen, he snorted, "I'm going back to the lab. I'll
put you in a taxi."

"Oh, let the beastly thing go for one night."

"Now that's unfair! I haven't worked late for three or four
nights now!"

"Then take me along."

"Nope. I have a hunch I may be working all night."

Liberty Street, as he raced along it, was sleeping below its
towers. It was McGurk's order that the elevator to the Institute
should run all night, and indeed three or four of the twenty
staff-members did sometimes use it after respectable hours.

That morning Martin had isolated a new strain of staphylo-
coccus bacteria from the gluteal carbuncle of a patient in the
Lower Manhattan Hospital, a carbuncle which was healing with
unusual rapidity. He had placed a bit of the pus in broth and
incubated it. In eight hours a good growth of bacteria had

318

appeared. Before going wearily home he had returned the flask
to the incubator.

He was not particularly interested in it, and now, in his lab-
oratory, he removed his military blouse, looked down to the
lights on the blue-black river, smoked a little, thought what a
dog he was not to be gentler to Leora, and damned Bert Tozer
and Pickerbaugh and Tubbs and anybody else who was handy
to his memory before he absent-mindedly wavered to the incu-
bator, and found that the flask, in which there should have been
a perceptible cloudy growth, had no longer any signs of bacteria
— of staphylococci.

"Now what the hell!" he cried. "Why, the broth's as clear
as when I seeded it! Now what the — Think of this fool accident
coming up just when I was going to start something new!"

He hastened from the incubator, in a closet off the corridor,
to his laboratory and, holding the flask under a strong light,
made certain that he had seen aright. He fretfully prepared a
slide from the flask contents and examined it under the micro-
scope. He discovered nothing but shadows of what had been
bacteria: thin outlines, the form still there but the cell substance
gone; minute skeletons on an infinitesimal battlefield.

He raised his head from the microscope, rubbed his tired eyes,
reflectively rubbed his neck — his blouse was off, his collar on the
floor, his shirt open at the throat. He considered:

"Something funny here. This culture was growing all right,
and now it's committed suicide. Never heard of bugs doing that
before. I've hit something! What caused it? Some chemical
change? Something organic?"

Now in Martin Arrowsmith there were no decorative hero-
isms, no genius for amours, no exotic wit, no edifyingly borne
misfortunes. He presented neither picturesque elegance nor a
moral message. He was full of hasty faults and of perverse hon-
esty; a young man often unkindly, often impolite. But he had
one gift: a curiosity whereby he saw nothing as ordinary. Had
he been an acceptable hero, like Major Rippleton Holabird, he
would have chucked the contents of the flask into the sink,
avowed with pretty modesty, "Silly! I've made some error!" and
gone his ways. But Martin, being Martin, walked prosaically up
and down his laboratory, snarling, "Now there was some cause
for that, and I'm going to find out what it was."

319

He did have one romantic notion: he would telephone to
Leora and tell her that splendor was happening, and she wasn't
to worry about him. He fumbled down the corridor, lighting
matches, trying to find electric switches.

At night all halls are haunted. Even in the smirkingly new
McGurk Building there had been a bookkeeper who committed
suicide. As Martin groped he was shakily conscious of feet pad-
ding behind him, of shapes which leered from doorways and
insolently vanished, of ancient bodiless horrors, and when he
found the switch he rejoiced in the blessing and security of
sudden light that recreated the world.

At the Institute telephone switchboard he plugged in wherever
it seemed reasonable. Once he thought he was talking to Leora,
but it proved to be a voice, sexless and intolerant, which said
"Nummer pleeeeeze" with a taut alertness impossible to anyone
so indolent as Leora. Once it was a voice which slobbered, "Is
this Sarah?" then, "I don't want you! Ring off, will yuh!" Once
a girl pleaded, "Honestly, Billy, I did try to get there but the
boss came in at five and he said — "

As for the rest it was only a burring; the sound of seven
million people hungry for sleep or love or money.

He observed, "Oh, rats, I guess Lee'll have gone to bed by
now," and felt his way back to the laboratory.

A detective, hunting the murderer of bacteria, he stood with
his head back, scratching his chin, scratching his memory for
like cases of microorganisms committing suicide or being slain
without perceptible cause. He rushed up-stairs to the library,
consulted the American and English authorities and, laboriously,
the French and German. He found nothing.

He worried lest there might, somehow, have been no living
staphylococci in the pus which he had used for seeding the
broth — none there to die. At a hectic run, not stopping for lights,
bumping corners and sliding on the too perfect tile floor, he
skidded down the stairs and galloped through the corridors to
his room. He found the remains of the original pus, made a
smear on a glass slide, and stained it with gentian-violet, nerv-
ously dribbling out one drop of the gorgeous dye. He sprang
to the microscope. As he bent over the brass tube and focused
the objective, into the gray-lavender circular field of vision rose

320

to existence the grape-like clusters of staphylococcus germs, pur-
ple dots against the blank plane.

"Staph in it, all right!" he shouted.

Then he forgot Leora, war, night, weariness, success, every-
thing, as he charged into preparations for an experiment, his
first great experiment. He paced furiously, rather dizzy. He
shook himself into calmness and settled down at a table, among
rings and spirals of cigarette smoke, to list on small sheets of
paper all the possible causes of suicide in the bacteria — all the
questions he had to answer and the experiments which should
answer them.

It might be that alkali in 'an improperly cleaned flask had
caused the clearing of the culture. It might be some anti-staph
substance existing in the pus, or something liberated by the
staphylococci themselves. It might be some peculiarity of this
particular broth.

Each of these had to be tested.

He pried open the door of the glass-storeroom, shattering the
lock. He took new flasks, cleaned them, plugged them with
cotton, and placed them in the hot-air oven to sterilize. He found
other batches of broth — as a matter of fact he stole them, from
Gottlieb's private and highly sacred supply in the ice-box. He
filtered some of the clarified culture through a sterile porcelain
filter, and added it to his regular staphylococcus strains.

And, perhaps most important of all, he discovered that he was
out of cigarettes.

Incredulously he slapped each ot his pockets, and went the
round and slapped them all over again. He looked into his
discarded military blouse; had a cheering idea about having seen
cigarettes in a drawer; did not find them; and brazenly marched
into the room where hung the aprons and jackets of the tech-
nicians. Furiously he pilfered pockets, and found a dozen beau-
tiful cigarettes in a wrinkled and flattened paper case.

To test each of the four possible causes of the flask's clearing
he prepared and seeded with bacteria a series of flasks under
varying conditions, and set them away in the incubator at body

(temperature. Till the last flask was put away, his hand was
steady, his worn face calm. He was above all nervousness, free
from all uncertainty, a professional going about his business.
By this time it was six o'clock of a fine wide August morning,
321

and as he ceased his swift work, as taut nerves slackened, he
looked out of his lofty window and was conscious of the world
below: bright roofs, jubilant towers, and a high-decked Sound
steamer swaggering up the glossy river.

He was completely fagged; he was, like a surgeon after a
battle, like a reporter during an earthquake, perhaps a little
insane; but sleepy he was not. He cursed the delay involved in
the growth of the bacteria, without which he could hot discover
the effect of the various sorts of broths and bacterial strains, but
choked his impatience.

He mounted the noisy slate stairway to the lofty world of the
roof. He listened at the door of the Institute's animal house. The
guinea pigs, awake and nibbling, were making a sound like that
of a wet cloth rubbed on glass in window-cleaning. He stamped
his foot, and in fright they broke out in their strange sound of
fear, like the cooing of doves.

He marched violently up and down, refreshed by the soaring
sky, till he was calmed to hunger. Again he went pillaging.
He found chocolate belonging to an innocent technician; he
even invaded the office of the Director and in the desk of the
Diana-like Pearl Robbins unearthed tea and a kettle (as well as
a lip-stick, and a love-letter beginning "My Little Ickles"). He
made himself a profoundly bad cup of tea, then, his whole body
dragging, returned to his table to set down elaborately, in a
shabby, nearly-filled note-book, every step of his experiment.

After seven he worked out the operation of the telephone
switchboard and called the Lower Manhattan Hospital. Could
Dr. Arrowsmith have some more pus from the same carbuncle?
What? It'd healed? Curse it! No more of that material.

He hesitated over waiting for Gottlieb's arrival, to tell him
of the discovery, but determined to keep silence till he should
have determined whether it was an accident. Eyes wide, too
wrought up to sleep in the subway, he fled uptown to tell Leora.
He had to tell someone! Waves of fear, doubt, certainty, and
fear again swept over him; his ears rang and his hands trembled.

He rushed up to the flat; he bawled "Lee! Lee!" before he
had unlocked the door. And she was gone.

He gaped. The flat breathed emptiness. He searched it again.
She had slept there, she had had a cup of coffee, but she had
vanished.

322

He was at once worried lest there had been an accident, and
furious that she should not have been here at the great hour.
Sullenly he made breakfast for himself. ... It is strange that
excellent bacteriologists and chemists should scramble eggs so
waterily, should make such bitter coffee and be so casual about
dirty spoons. ... By the time he had finished the mess he was
ready to believe that Leora had left him forever. He quavered,
"I've neglected her a lot." Sluggishly, an old man now, he started
for the Institute, and at the entrance to the subway he met he.

She wailed, "I was so worried! I couldn't get you on thf.
'phone. I went clear down to the Institute to see what'd happened
to you."

He kissed her, very competently, and raved, "God, woman,
I've got it! The real big stuff! I've found something, not a
chemical you put in I mean, that eats bugs — dissolves 'em — kills
'em. May be a big new step in therapeutics. Oh, no, rats, I don't
suppose it really is. Prob'ly just another of my bulls."

She sought to reassure him but he did not wait. He dashed
down to the subway, promising to telephone to her. By ten, he
was peering into his incubator.

There was a cloudy appearance of bacteria in all the flasks
except those in which he had used broth from the original alarm-
ing flask. In these, the mysterious murderer of germs had pre-
vented the growth of the new bacteria which he had introduced.

"Great stuff," he said.

He returned the flasks to the incubator, recorded his observa-
tions, went again to the library, and searched handbooks, bound
proceedings of societies, periodicals in three languages. He had
acquired a reasonable scientific French and German. It is doubt-
ful whether he could have bought a drink or asked the way to
the Kursaal in either language, but he understood the universal
Hellenistic scientific jargon, and he pawed through the heavy
books, rubbing his eyes, which were filled with salty fire.

He remembered that he was an army officer and had lipo-
vaccine to make this morning. He went to work, but he was
so twitchy that he ruined the batch, called his patient garcon a
fool, and after this injustice sent him out for a pint of whisky.

He had to have a confidant. He telephoned to Leora, lunched
with her expensively, and asserted, "It still looks as if there were
something to it." He was back in the Institute every hour that

323

afternoon, glancing at his flasks, but between he tramped the
streets, creaking with weariness, drinking too much coffee.

Every five minutes it came to him, as a quite new and ecstatic
idea, "Why don't I go to sleep?" then he remembered, and
groaned, "No, I've got to keep going and watch every step. Can't
leave it, or I'll have to begin all over again. But I'm so sleepy!
Why don't I go to sleep?"

He dug down, before six, into a new layer of strength, and
at six his examination showed that the flasks containing the
original broth still had no growth of bacteria, and the flasks
which he had seeded with the original pus had, like the first
eccentric flask, after beginning to display a good growth of bac-
teria cleared up again under the slowly developing attack of
the unknown assassin.

He sat down, drooping with relief. He had it! He stated in
the conclusions of his first notes:

"I have observed a principle, which I shall temporarily call
the X Principle, in pus from a staphylococcus infection, which
checks the growth of several strains of staphylococcus, and which
dissolves the staphylococci from the pus in question."

When he had finished, at seven, his head was on his notebook
and he was asleep.

He awoke at ten, went home, ate like a savage, slept again,
and was in the laboratory before dawn. His next rest was an
hour that afternoon, sprawled on his laboratory table, with his
garcon on guard; the next, a day and a half later, was eight
hours in bed, from dawn till noon.

But in dreams he was constantly upsetting a rack of test-
tubes or breaking a flask. He discovered an X Principle which
dissolved chairs, tables, human beings. He went about smearing
it on Bert Tozers and Dr. Bissexes and fiendishly watching
them vanish, but accidentally he dropped it on Leora and saw
her fading, and he woke screaming to find the real Leora's arms
about him, while he sobbed, "Oh, I couldn't do anything with-
out you! Don't ever leave me! I do love you so, even if this
damned work does keep me tied up. Stay with me!"

While she sat by him on the frowsy bed, gay in her gingham,
he went to sleep, to wake up three hours later and start off for
the Institute, his eyes blood-glaring and set. She was ready for

324

him with strong coffee, waiting on him silently, looking at him
proudly, while he waved his arms, babbling:

"Gottlieb better not talk any more about the importance oi
new observations! The X Principle may not just apply to staph.
Maybe you can sic it on any bug — cure any germ disease by it.
Bug that lives on bugs! Or maybe it's a chemical principle, an
enzyme. Oh, I don't know. But I will!"

As he bustled to the Institute he swelled with the certainty
that after years of stumbling he had arrived. He had visions of
his name in journals and textbooks; of scientific meetings cheer'
ing him. He had been an unknown among the experts of the
Institute, and now he pitied all of them. But when he was back
at his bench the grandiose aspirations faded and he was the
sniffing, snuffling beagle, the impersonal worker. Before him,
supreme joy of the investigator, new mountain-passes of work
opened, and in him was new power.

ii

For a week Martin's life had all the regularity of an escaped
soldier in the enemy's country, with the same agitation and the
same desire to prowl at night. He was always sterilizing flasks,
preparing media of various hydrogen-ion concentrations, copying
his old notes into a new book lovingly labeled "X Principle,
Staph," and adding to it further observations. He tried, elabo-
rately, with many flasks and many reseedings, to determine
whether the X Principle would perpetuate itself indefinitely,
whether when it was transmitted from tube to new tube of
bacteria it would reappear, whether, growing by cell-division
automatically, it was veritably a germ, a sub-gerrn infecting
germs.

During the week Gottlieb occasionally peered over his shoul-
der, but Martin was unwilling to report until he should have
proof, and one good night's sleep, and perhaps even a shave.

When he was sure that the X Principle did reproduce itself
indefinitely, so that in the tenth tube it grew to have as much
effect as in the first, then he solemnly called on Gottlieb and
laid before him his results, with his plans for further investi-
gation.

The old man tapped his thin fingers on the report, read it

intently, looked up and, not wasting time in congratulations,
vomited questions:

Have you done dis? Why have you not done dat? At what
temperature is the activity of the Principle at its maximum?
Is its activity manifested on agar-solid medium?

"This is my plan for new work. I think you'll find it includes
most of your suggestions."

"Huh!" Gottlieb ran through it and snorted, "Why have you
not planned to propagate it on dead staph? That is most impor-
tant of all."

"Why?"

Gottlieb flew instantly to the heart of the jungle in which
Martin had struggled for many days: "Because that will show
whether you are dealing with a living virus."

Martin was humbled, but Gottlieb beamed:

"You haf a big thing. Now do not let the Director know about
this and get enthusiastic too soon. I am glad, Martin!"

There was that in his voice which sent Martin swanking
down the corridor, back to work — and to not sleeping.

What the X Principle was — chemical or germ — he could not
determine, but certainly the original Principle flourished. It could
be transmitted indefinitely; he determined the best temperature
for it and found that it did not propagate on dead staphylococ-
cus. When he added a drop containing the Principle to a growth
of staphylococcus which was a gray film on the solid surface
of agar, the drop was beautifully outlined by bare patches, as
the enemy made its attack, so that the agar slant looked like
moth-eaten beeswax. But within a fortnight one of the knots
of which Gottlieb warned him appeared.

Wary of the hundreds of bacteriologists who would rise to
slay him once his paper appeared, he sought to make sure that
his results could be confirmed. At the hospital he obtained pus
from many boils, of the arms, the legs, the back; he sought to
reduplicate his results — and failed, complete. No X Principle
appeared in any of the new boils, and sadly he went to Gottlieb.

The old man meditated, asked a question or two, sat hunched
in his cushioned chair, and demanded:

"What kind of a carbuncle was the original one?"

"Gluteal."

326

"Ah, den the X Principle may be present in the intestinal
contents. Look for it, in people with boils and without.'*

Martin dashed off. In a week he had obtained the Principle
from intestinal contents and from other gluteal boils, finding
an especial amount in boils which were "healing of themselves";
and he transplanted his new Principle, in a heaven of triumph,
of admiration for Gottlieb. He extended his investigation to the
intestinal group of organisms and discovered an X Principle
against the colon bacillus. At the same time he gave some of
the original Principle to a doctor in the Lower Manhattan Hos-
pital for the treatment of boils, and from him had excited re-
ports of cures, more excited inquiries as to what this mystery
might be.

With these new victories he went parading in to Gottlieb,
and suddenly he was being trounced:

"Oh! So! Beautiful! You let a doctor try it before you finished
your research? You want fake reports of cures to get into the
newspapers, to be telegraphed about places, and have everybody
in the world that has a pimple come tumbling in to be cured,
so you will never be able to work? You want to be a miracle
man, and not a scientist? You do not want to complete things?
You wander off monkey-skipping and flap-doodeling with colon
bacillus before you have finish with staph — before you haf really
begun your work — before you have found what is the nature of
the X Principle? Get out of my office! You are a — a — a college
president! Next I know you will be dining with Tubbs, and get
your picture in the papers for a smart cure-vendor!"

Martin crept out, and when he met Billy Smith in the cor-
ridor and the little chemist twittered, "Up to something big?
Haven't seen you lately," Martin answered in the tone of Doc
Vickerson's assistant in Elk Mills:

"Oh — no — gee — I'm just grubbing along, I guess."

in

As sharply and quite as impersonally as he would have
watched the crawling illness of an infected guinea pig, Martin
watched himself, in the madness of overwork, drift toward
neurasthenia. With considerable interest he looked up the symp-

327

toms of neurasthenia, saw one after another of them twitch at
him, and casually took the risk.

From an irritability which made him a thoroughly impossible
person to live with, he passed into a sick nervousness in which
he missed things for which he reached, dropped test-tubes,
gasped at sudden footsteps behind him. Dr. Yeo's croaking voice
became to him a fever, an insult, and he waited with his whole
body clenched, muttering, "Shut up — shut up — oh, shut up!"
when Yeo stopped to talk to someone outside his door.

Then he was obsessed by the desire to spell backward all the
words which snatched at him from signs.

As he stood dragging out his shoulder on a subway strap, he
pored over the posters, seeking new words to spell backward.
Some of them were remarkably agreeable: No Smoking became
a jaunty and agreeable "gnikoms on," and Broadway was toler-
able as "yawdaorb," but he was displeased by his attempts on
Punch, Health, Rough; while Strength, turning into "htgnerts"
was abominable.

When he had to return to his laboratory three times before
he was satisfied that he had closed the window, he sat down,
coldly, informed himself that he was on the edge, and took
council as to whether he dared go on. It was not very good
council: he was so glorified by his unfolding work that his self
could not be taken seriously.

At last Fear closed in on him.

It began with childhood's terror of the darkness. He lay awake
dreading burglars; footsteps in the hall were a creeping cut-
throat; an unexplained scratching on the fire-escape was a mur-
derer with an automatic in his fist. He beheld it so clearly that
he had to spring from bed and look timorously out, and when
in the street below he did actually see a man standing still, he
was cold with panic.

Every sky glow was a fire. He was going to be trapped in
his bed, be smothered, die writhing.

He knew absolutely that his fears were absurd, and that
knowledge did not at all keep them from dominating him.

He was ashamed at first to acknowledge his seeming cow-
ardice to Leora. Admit that he was crouching like a child? But
when he had lain rigid, almost screaming, feeling the cord of
an assassin squeezing his throat, till the safe dawn brought back

328

a dependable world, he muttered of "insomnia" and after that,
night on night, he crept into her arms and she shielded him
from the horrors, protected him from garroters, kept away the
fire.

He made a checking list of the favorite neurasthenic fears:
agoraphobia, claustrophobia, pyrophobia, anthropophobia, and
the rest, ending with what he asserted to be "the most fool, pre-
tentious, witch-doctor term of the whole bloomin' lot," namely,
siderodromophobia, the fear of a railway journey. The first night,
he was able to check against pyrophobia, for at the vaudeville
with Leora, when on the stage a dancer lighted a brazier, he
sat waiting for the theater to take fire. He looked cautiously
along the row of seats (raging at himself the while for doing
it), he estimated his chance of reaching an exit, and became easy
only when he had escaped into the street.

It was when anthropophobia set in, when he was made un-
easy by people who walked too close to him, that, sagely view-
ing his list and seeing how many phobias were now checked, he
permitted himself to rest.

He fled to the Vermont hills for a four-day tramp — alone, that
he might pound on the faster. He went at night, by sleeper, and
was able to make the most interesting observations of sidero-
dromophobia.

He lay in a lower berth, the little pillow wadded into a lump.
He was annoyed by the waving of his clothes as they trailed
from the hanger beside him, at the opening of the green curtains.
The window-shade was up six inches; it left a milky blur across
which streaked yellow lights, emphatic in the noisy darkness of
his little cell. He was shivering with anxiety. Whenever he tried
to relax, he was ironed back into apprehension. When the train
stopped between stations and from the engine came a question-
ing, fretful whistle, he was aghast with certainty that something
had gone wrong — a bridge was out, a train was ahead of them;
perhaps another was coming just behind them, about to smash
into them at sixty miles an hour —

He imagined being wrecked, and he suffered more than from
the actual occurrence, for he pictured not one wreck but half
a dozen, with assorted miseries. . . . The flat wheel just beneath
him — surely it shouldn't pound like that — why hadn't the con-
founded man with the hammer detected it at the last big sta-

329

tion? — the flat wheel cracking; the car lurching, falling, being
dragged on its side. ... A collision, a crash, the car instantly
a crumpled, horrible heap, himself pinned in the telescoped
berth, caught between seat and seat. Shrieks, death groans, the
creeping flames. . . . The car turning, falling, plumping into a
river on its side; himself trying to crawl through a window as
the water seeped about his body. . . . Himself standing by the
wrenched car, deciding whether to keep away and protect his
sacred work or go back, rescue people, and be killed.

So real were the visions that he could not endure lying here,
waiting. He reached for the berth light, and could not find the
button. In agitation he tore a match-box from. his coat pocket,
scratched a match, snapped on the light. He saw himself, under
the sheets, reflected in the polished wooden ceiling of his berth
like a corpse in a coffin. Hastily he crawled out, with trousers
and coat over his undergarments (he had somehow feared to
show so much trust in the train as to put on pajamas), and with
bare disgusted feet he paddled up to the smoking compartment.

The porter was squatting on a stool, polishing an amazing
pile of shoes.

Martin longed for his encouraging companionship, and ven-
tured, "Warm night."

"Uh-huh," said the porter.

Martin curled on the chill leather seat of the smoking com-
partment, profoundly studying a brass wash-bowl. He was con-
scious that the porter was disapproving, but he had comfort in
calculating that the man must make this run thrice a week, tens
of thousands of miles yearly, apparently without being killed, and
there might be a chance of their lasting till morning.

He smoked till his tongue was raw and till, fortified by the
calmness of the porter, he laughed at the imaginary catastrophes.
He staggered sleepily to his berth.

Instantly he was tense again, and he lay awake till dawn.

For four days he tramped, swam in cold brooks, slept under
trees or in straw stacks, and came back (but by day) with
enough reserve of energy to support him till his experiment
should have turned from overwhelming glory into sane and
entertaining routine.

330

CHAPTER XXIX

WHEN the work on the X Principle had gone on for
six weeks, the Institute staff suspected that something
was occurring, and they hinted to Martin that he
needed their several assistances. He avoided them. He did not
desire to be caught in any of the log-rolling factions, though for
Terry Wickett, still in France, and for Terry's rough compul
sion to honesty he was sometimes lonely.

How the Director first heard that Martin was finding gold is
not known.

Dr. Tubbs was tired of being a Colonel — there were too many
Generals in New York — and for two weeks he had not had an
Idea which would revolutionize even a small part of the world.
One morning he burst in, whiskers alive, and reproached Martin:

"What is this mysterious discovery you're making, Arrow-
smith? I've asked Dr. Gottlieb, but he evades me; he says you
want to be sure, first. I must know about it, not only because
I take a very friendly interest in your work but because I am,
after all, your Director!"

Martin felt that his one ewe lamb was being snatched from
him but he could see no way to refuse. He brought out his
note-books and the agar slants with their dissolved patches of
bacilli. Tubbs gasped, assaulted his whiskers, did a moment of
impressive thinking, and clamored:

"Do you mean to say you think you've discovered an infec-
tious disease of bacteria, and you haven't told me about it?
My dear boy, I don't believe you quite realize that you may
have hit on the supreme way to kill pathogenic bacteria. . . .
And you didn't tell me!"

"Well, sir, I wanted to make certain — "

"I admire your caution, but you must understand, Martin,

331

that the basic aim of this Institution is the conquest of disease,
not making pretty scientific notes! You may have hit on one of
the discoveries of a generation; the sort of thing that Mr.
McGurk and I are looking for. ... If your results are con-
firmed. ... I shall ask Dr. Gottlieb's opinion."

He shook Martin's hand five or six times and bustled out.
Next day he called Martin to his office, shook his hand some
more, told Pearl Robbins that they were honored to know him,
then led him to a mountain top and showed him all the king-
doms of the world:

"Martin, I have some plans for you. You have been working
brilliantly, but without a complete vision of broader humanity.
Now the Institute is organized on the most flexible lines. There
are no set departments, but only units formed about exceptional
men like our good friend Gottlieb. If any new man has the real
right thing, we'll provide him with every facility, instead of let-
ting him merely plug along doing individual work. I have given
your results the most careful consideration, Martin; I have talked
them over with Dr. Gottliet) — though I must say he does not
altogether share my enthusiasm about immediate practical re-
sults. And I have decided to submit to the Board of Trustees a
plan for a Department of Microbic Pathology, with you as head!
You will have an assistant — a real trained Ph.D. — and more
room and technicians, and you will report to me directly, talk
things over with me daily, instead of with Gottlieb. You will be
relieved of all war work, by my order — though you can retain
your uniform and everything. And your salary will be, I should
think, if Mr. McGurk and the other Trustees confirm me, ten
thousand a year instead of five.

"Yes, the best room for you would be that big one on the
upper floor, to the right of the elevators. That's vacant now.
And your office across the hall.

"And all the assistance you require. Why, my boy, you won't
need to sit up nights using your hands in this wasteful way,
but just think things out and take up possible extensions of the
work — cover all the possible fields. We'll extend this to every-
thing! We'll have scores of physicians in hospitals helping us
and confirming our results and widening our efforts. . . . We
might have a weekly council of all these doctors and assistants,
with you and me jointly presiding. ... If men like Koch and

332

Pasteur had only had such a system, how much more scape
their work might have had! Efficient universal co-operation —
that's the thing in science today — the time of this silly, jealous,
fumbling individual research has gone by.

"My boy, we may have found the real thing — another salvar-
san! We'll publish together! We'll have the whole world talking!
Why, I lay awake last night thinking of our magnificent oppor-
tunity! In a few months we may be curing not only staph in-
fections but typhoid, dysentery! Martin, as your colleague, I do
not for a moment wish to detract from the great credit which
is yours, but I must say that if you had been more closely allied
with Me you would have extended your work to practical proofs
and results long before this."

Martin wavered back to his room, dazzled by the view of a
department of his own, assistants, a cheering world — and ter*
thousand a year. But his work seemed to have been taken from
him, his own self had been taken from him; he was no longer
to be Martin, and Gottlieb's disciple, but a Man of Measured
Merriment, Dr. Arrowsmith, Head of the Department of Mi
crobic Pathology, who would wear severe collars and make
addresses and never curse.

Doubts enfeebled him. Perhaps the X Principle would develop
only in the test-tube; perhaps it had no large value for human
healing. He wanted to know — to \now.

Then Rippleton Holabird burst in on him:

"Martin, my dear boy, the Director has just been telling me
about your discovery and his splendid plans for you. I want to
congratulate you with all my heart, and to welcome you as a
fellow department-head — and you so young — only thirty-four,
isn't it? What a magnificent future! Think, Martin" — Major
Holabird discarded his dignity, sat astride a chair — "think of all
you have ahead! If this work really pans out, there's no limit
to the honors that'll come to you, you lucky young dog! Acclaim
by scientific societies, any professorship you might happen to
want, prizes, the biggest men begging to consult you, a ripping
place in society!

"Now listen, old boy: Perhaps you know how close I am to
Dr. Tubbs, and I see no reason why you shouldn't come in
with us, and we three run things here to suit ourselves. Wasn't
it simply too decent of the Director to be so eager to recognize

333

and help you in every way! So cordial — and so helpful. Now
you really understand him. And the three of us — Some day we
might be able to erect a superstructure of co-operative science
which would control not only McGurk but every institute and
every university scientific department in the country, and so
produce really efficient research. When Dr. Tubbs retires, I have
— I'm speaking with the most complete confidence — I have some
reason to suppose that the Board of Trustees will consider me
as his successor. Then, old boy, if this work succeeds, you and
I can do things together!

"To be ever so frank, there are very#few men in our world
(think of poor old Yeo!) who combine presentable personalities
with first-rate achievement, and if you'll just get over some of
your abruptness and your unwillingness to appreciate big execu-
tives and charming women (because, thank God, you do wear
your clothes well — when you take the trouble!) why, you and
I can become the dictators of science throughout the whole
country!"

Martin did not think of an answer till Holabird had gone.

He perceived the horror of the shrieking bawdy thing called
Success, with its demand that he give up quiet work and parade
forth to be pawed by every blind devotee and mud-spattered by
every blind enemy.

He fled to Gottlieb as to the wise and tender father, and
begged to be saved from Success and Holabirds and A. DeWitt
Tubbses and their hordes of address-making scientists, degree-
hunting authors, pulpit orators, popular surgeons, valeted jour-
nalists, sentimental merchant princes, literary politicians, titled
sportsmen, statesmenlike generals, interviewed senators, senten-
tious bishops.

Gottlieb was worried:

"I knew Tubbs was up to something idealistic and nasty when
he came purring to me, but I did not t'ink he would try to turn
you into a megaphone all so soon in one day! I will gird up
my loins and go oud to battle with the forces of publicity!"

He was defeated.

"I have let you alone, Dr. Gottlieb," said Tubbs, "but, hang
it, I am the Director! And I must say that, perhaps owing to
my signal stupidity, I fail to see the horrors of enabling Arrow-

334

smith to cure thousands of suffering persons and to become a
man of weight and esteem!"

Gottlieb took it to Ross McGurk.

"Max, I love you like a brother, but Tubbs is the Director,
and if he feels he needs this Arrowsmith (Is he the thin young
fellow I see around your lab?) then I have no right to stop him.
I've got to back him up the same as I would the master of one
of our ships," said McGurk.

Not till the Board of Trustees, which consisted of McGurk
himself, the president of the University of Wilmington, and
three professors of science in various universities, should meet
and give approval, would Martin be a department-head. Mean-
time Tubbs demanded:

"Now, Martin, you must hasten and publish your results. Get
right to it. In fact you should have done it before this. Throw
your material together as rapidly as possible and send a note
in to the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, to be
published in their next proceedings."

"But I'm not ready to publish! I want to have every loop-
hole plugged up before I announce anything whatever!"

"Nonsense! That attitude is old-fashioned. This is no longer
an age of parochialism but of competition, in art and science
just as much as in commerce — co-operation with your own
group, but with those outside it, competition to the death! Plug
up the holes thoroughly, later, but we can't have somebody else
stealing a march on us. Remember you have your name to make.
The way to make it is by working with me — toward the greatest
good for the greatest number."

As Martin began his paper, thinking of resigning but giving
it up because Tubbs seemed to him at least better than the Pick-
erbaughs, he had a vision of a world of little scientists, each
busy in a roofless cell. Perched on a cloud, watching them, was
the divine Tubbs, a glory of whiskers, ready to blast any of the
little men who stopped being earnest and wasted time on specu-
lation about anything which he had not assigned to them. Back
of their welter of coops, unseen by the tutelary Tubbs, the lean
giant figure of Gottlieb stood sardonic on a stormy horizon.

Literary expression was not easy to Martin. He delayed with
his paper, while Tubbs became irritable and whipped him on.
The experiments had ceased; there were misery and pen-scratch-

335

ing and much tearing of manuscript paper in Martin's particular
roofless cell.

For once he had no refuge in Leora. She cried:

"Why not? Ten thousand a year would be awfully nice,
Sandy. Gee! We've always been so poor, and you do like nice
flats and things. And to boss your own department — And you
could consult Dr. Gottlieb just the same. He's a department-
head, isn't he, and yet he keeps independent of Dr. Tubbs. Oh,
I'm for it!"

And slowly, under the considerable increase in respect given
to him at Institute lunches, Martin himself was "for it."

"We could get one of those new apartments on Park Avenue.
Don't suppose they cost more than three thousand a year," he
meditated. "Wouldn't be so bad to be able to entertain people
there. Not that I'd let it interfere with my work. . . . Kind of
nice."

It was still more kind of nice, however agonizing in the tak-
ing, to be recognized socially.

Capitola McGurk, who hitherto had not perceived him except
as an object less interesting than Gladys the Centrifuge, tele-
phoned: ". . . Dr. Tubbs so enthusiastic and Ross and I are so
pleased. Be delighted if Mrs. Arrowsmith and you could dine
with us next Thursday at eight-thirty."

Martin accepted the royal command.

It was his conviction that after glimpses of Angus Duer and
Rippleton Holabird he had seen luxury, and understood smart
dinner parties. Leora and he went without too much agitation
to the house of Ross McGurk, in the East Seventies, near Fifth
Avenue. The house did, from the street, seem to have an un-
usual quantity of graystone gargoyles and carven lintels and
bronze grills, but it did not seem large.

Inside, the vaulted stone hallway opened up like a cathedral.
They were embarrassed by the footmen, awed by the automatic
elevator, oppressed by a hallway full of vellum folios and Italian
chests and a drawing-room full of water-colors, and reduced
to rusticity by Capitola's queenly white satin and pearls.

There were eight or ten Persons of Importance, male and
female, looking insignificant but bearing names as familiar as
Ivory Soap.

Did one give his arm to some unknown lady and "take her

336

in," Martin wondered. He rejoiced to find that one merely
straggled into the dining-room under McGurk's amiable basso
herding.

The dining-room was gorgeous and very hideous, in stamped
leather and hysterias of gold, with collections of servants watch-
ing one's use of asparagus forks. Martin was seated (it is doubt-
ful if he ever knew that he was the guest of honor) between
Capitola McGurk and a woman of whom he could learn only
that she was the sister of a countess.

Capitola leaned toward him in her great white splendor.

"Now, Dr. Arrowsmith, just what is this you are discover-
ing?"

"Why, it's— uh— I'm trying to figure—"

"Dr. Tubbs tells us that you have found such wonderful new
ways of controlling disease." Her L's were a melody of summer
rivers, her R's the trill of birds in the brake. "Oh, what — what
could be more beau-tiful than relieving this sad old world of its
burden of illness! But just precisely what is it that you're doing?"

"Why, it's awfully early to be sure but — You see, it's like this.
You take certain bugs like staph — "

"Oh, how interesting science is, but how frightfully difficult
for simple people like me to grasp! But we're all so humble.
We're just waiting for scientists like you to make the world
secure for friendship — "

Then Capitola gave all her attention to her other man. Martin
looked straight ahead and ate and suffered. The sister of the
countess, a sallow and stringy woman, was glowing at him.
He turned with unhappy meekness (noting that she had one
more fork than he, and wondering where he had got lost).

She blared, "You are a scientist, I am told."

"Ye-es."

"The trouble with scientists is that they do not understand
beauty. They are so cold."

Rippleton Holabird would have made pretty mirth, but Mar-
tin could only quaver, "No, I don't think that's true," and con-
sider whether he dared drink another glass of champagne.

When they had been herded back to the drawing-room, after
masculine but achingly elaborate passings of the port, Capitola
swooped on him with white devouring wings:

"Dear Dr. Arrowsmith, I reallv didn't get a chance at dinner

337

to ask you just exactly what you are doing. . . . Oh! Have you
seen my dear little children at the Charles Street settlement?
I'm sure ever so many of them will become the most fascinating
scientists. You must come lecture to them."

That night he fretted to Leora, "Going to be hard to keep
up this twittering. But I suppose I've got to learn to enjoy it.
Oh, well, think how nice it'll be to give some dinners of our
own, with real people, Gottlieb and everybody, when I'm a
department-head."

Next morning Gottlieb came slowly into Martin's room. He
stood by the window; he seemed to be avoiding Martin's eyes.
He sighed, "Something sort of bad — perhaps not altogether bad
— has happened."

"What is it, sir? Anything I can do?"

"It does not apply to me. To you."

Irritably Martin thought, "Is he going into all this danger-of-
rapid-success stuff again? I'm getting tired of it!"

Gottlieb ambled toward him. "It iss a pity, Martin, but you
are not the discoverer of the X Principle."

"Wh-what— "

"Someone else has done it."

"They have not! I've searched all the literature, and except
for Twort, not one person has even hinted at anticipating —
Why, good Lord, Dr. Gottlieb, it would mean that all I've done,
all these weeks, has just been waste, and I'm a fool — "

"Veil. Anyvay. D'Herelle of the Pasteur Institute has just now
published in the Comptes Rendus, Academie des Sciences, a
report — it is your X Principle, absolute. Only he calls it 'bacterio-
phage.' So."

"Then I'm—"

In his mind Martin finished it, "Then I'm not going to be a
department-head or famous or anything else. I'm back in the
gutter." All strength went out of him and all purpose, and the
light of creation faded to dirty gray.

"Now of course," said Gottlieb, "you could claim to be co-
discoverer and spend the rest of your life fighting to get recog-
nized. Or you could forget it, and write a nice letter congratu-
lating D'Herelle, and go back to work."

Martin mourned, "Oh, I'll go back to work. Nothing else to
do. I guess Tubbs'll chuck the new department now. I'll have

338

time to really finish my research — maybe I've got some points
that D'Herelle hasn't hit on — and I'll publish it to corroborate
him. . . . Damn him! . . . Where is his report? ... I suppose
you're glad that I'm saved from being a Holabird."

"I ought to be. It is a sin against my religion that I am not.
But I am getting old. And you are my friend. I am sorry you are
not to have the fun of being pretentious and successful — for a
while. . . . Martin, it iss nice that you will corroborate D'Herelle.
That is science: to work and not to care — too much — if some-
body else gets the credit. . . . Shall I tell Tubbs about D'Herelle's
priority, or will you?"

Gottlieb straggled away, looking back a little sadly.

Tubbs came in to wail, "If you had only published earlier, as
I told you, Dr. Arrowsmith! You have really put me in a most
embarrassing position before the Board of Trustees. Of course
there can be no question now of a new department."

"Yes," said Martin vacantly.

He carefully filed away the beginnings of his paper and turned
to his bench. He stared at a shining flask till it fascinated him
like a crystal ball. He pondered:

"Wouldn't have been so bad if Tubbs had let me alone. Damn
these old men, damn these Men of Measured Merriment, these
Important Men that come and offer you honors. Money. Decora-
tions. Titles. Want to make you windy with authority. Honors!
If you get 'em, you become pompous, and then when you're used
to 'em, if you lose 'em you feel foolish.

"So I'm not going to be rich. Leora, poor kid, she won't have
her new dresses and flat and everything. We — Won't be so
much fun in the lil old flat, now. Oh, quit whining!

"I wish Terry were here.

"I love that man Gottlieb. He might have gloated —

"Bacteriophage, the Frenchman calls it. Too long. Better just
call it phage. Even got to take his name for it, for my own X
Principle! Well, I had a lot of fun, working all those nights.
Working—"

He was coming out of his trance. He imagined the flask filled
with staph-clouded broth. He plodded into Gottlieb's office to
secure the journal containing D'Herelle's report, and read it
minutely, enthusiastically.

"There's a man, there's a scientist!" he chuckled.

339

On his way home he was planning to experiment on the
Shiga dysentery bacillus with phage (as henceforth he called the
X Principle), planning to volley questions and criticisms at
D'Herelle, hoping that Tubbs would not discharge him for a
while, and expanding with relief that he would not have to do
his absurd premature paper on phage, that he could be lewd
and soft-collared and easy, not judicious and spied-on and
weighty.

He grinned, "Gosh, I'll bet Tubbs was disappointed! He'd
figured on signing all my papers with me and getting the credit.
Now for this Shiga experiment — Poor Lee, she'll have to get
used to my working nights, I guess."

Leora kept to herself what she felt about it — or at least most
of what she felt.

34°

CHAPTER XXX

FOR a year broken only by Terry Wickett's return after the
Armistice, and by the mockeries of that rowdy intelligence,
Martin was in a grind of drudgery. Week on week he
toiled at complicated phage experiments. His work — his hands,
his technique — became more adept, and his days more steady,
less fretful.

He returned to his evening studying. He went from mathe-
matics into physical chemistry; began to understand the mass
action law; became as sarcastic as Terry about what he called
the "bedside manner" of Tubbs and Holabird; read much
French and German; went canoeing on the Hudson on Sunday
afternoons; and had a bawdy party with Leora and Terry to
celebrate the day when the Institute was purified by the sale of
Holabird's pride, Gladys the Centrifuge.

He suspected that Dr. Tubbs, now magnificent with the rib-
bon of the Legion of Honor, had retained him in the Institute
only because of Gottlieb's intervention. But it may be that Tubbs
and Holabird hoped he would again blunder into publicity-
bringing miracles, for they were both polite to him at lunch —
polite and wistfully rebuking, and full of meaty remarks about
publishing one's discoveries early instead of dawdling.

It was more than a year after Martin's anticipation by
D'Herelle when Tubbs appeared in the laboratory with sug-
gestions:

"I've been thinking, Arrowsmith," said Tubbs.

He looked it.

"D'Herelle's discovery hasn't aroused the popular interest 1
thought it would. If he'd only been here with us, I'd have seen
to it that he got the proper attention. Practically no newspaper
comment at all. Perhaps we can still do something. As I under-

341

stand it, you've been going along with what Dr. Gottlieb would
call 'fundamental research.' I think it may now be time for you
[o use phage in practical healing. I want you to experiment with
phage in pneumonia, plague, perhaps typhoid, and when your
experiments get going, make some practical tests in collaboration
with the hospitals. Enough of all this mere frittering and vanity.
Let's really cure somebody!"

Martin was not free from a fear of dismissal if he refused to
obey. Ana he was touched as Tubbs went on:

"Arrowsmith, I suspect you sometimes feel I lack a sense of
scientific precision when I insist on practical results. I — Some-
how I don't see the really noble and transforming results coming
out of this Institute that we ought to be getting, with our facili-
ties. I'd like to do something big, my boy, something fine for
poor humanity, before I pass on. Can't you give it to me? Go
cure the plague!"

For once Tubbs was a tired smile and not an earnestness of
whiskers.

That day, concealing from Gottlieb his abandonment of the
quest for the fundamental nature of phage, Martin set about
fighting pneumonia, before attacking the Black Death. And
when Gottlieb learned of it, he was absorbed in certain troubles
of his own.

Martin cured rabbits of pleuro-pneumonia by the injection of
phage, and by feeding them with it he prevented the spread of
pneumonia. He found that phage-produced immunity could be
as infectious as a disease.

He was pleased with himself, and expected pleasure from
Tubbs, but for weeks Tubbs did not heed him. He was of! on
a new enthusiasm, the most virulent of his whole life: he was
organizing the League of Cultural Agencies.

He was going to standardize and co-ordinate all mental activi-
ties in America, by the creation of a bureau which should direct
and pat and gently rebuke and generally encourage chemistry
and batik-making, poetry and Arctic exploration, animal hus-
bandry and Bible study, Negro spirituals and business-letter writ-
ing. He was suddenly in conference with conductors of sym-
phony orchestras, directors of art-schools, owners of itinerant
Chautauquas, liberal governors, ex-clergymen who wrote tasty
philosophy for newspaper syndicates, in fact all the proprietors

342

of American intellectuality — particularly including a millionaiie
named Minnigen who had recently been elevating the artistic
standards of the motion pictures.

Tubbs was all over the Institute inviting the researchers to
join him in the League of Cultural Agencies with its fascinating
committee-meetings and dinners. Most of them grunted, "The
Old Man is erupting again," and forgot him, but one ex-major
went out every evening to confer with serious ladies who wore
distinguished frocks, who sobbed over "the loss of spiritual and
intellectual horse-power through lack of co-ordination," and who
went home in limousines.

There were rumors. Dr. Billy Smith whispered that he had
gone in to see Tubbs and heard McGurk shouting at him, "Your
job is to run this shop and not work for that land-stealing, four-
flushing, play-producing son of evil, Pete Minnigen!"

The morning after, when Martin ambled to his laboratory, he
discovered a gasping, a muttering, a shaking in the corridors,
and incredulously he heard:

"Tubbs has resigned!"

"No!"

"They say he's gone to his League of Cultural Agencies. This
fellow Minnigen has given the League a scad of money, and
Tubbs is to get twice the salary he had here!"

ii

Instantly, for all but the zealots like Gottlieb, Terry, Martin,
and the bio-physics assistant, research was halted. There was a
surging of factions, a benevolent and winning buzz of scientists
who desired to be the new Director of the Institute.

Rippleton Holabird, Yeo the carpenter-like biologist, Gilling-
ham the joky chief in bio-physics, Aaron Sholtheis the neat Rus-
sian Jewish High Church Episcopalian, all of them went about
with expressions of modest willingness. They were affectionate
with everybody they met in the corridors, however violent they
were in private discussions. Added to them were no few out-
siders, professors and researchers in other institutes, who found
it necessary to come and confer about rather undefined matters
with Ross McGurk.

Terry remarked to Martin, "Probably Pearl Robbins and youl

343

garcon are pitching horseshoes for the Directorship. My gar<;on
ain't — the only reason, though, is because I've just murdered
him. At that, I think Pearl would be the best choice. She's been
Tubbs's secretary so long that she's learned all his ignorance
about scientific technique."

Rippleton Holabird was the most unctuous of the office seek-
ers, and the most hungry. The war over, he missed his uniform
and his authority. He urged Martin:

"You know how I've always believed in your genius, Martin,
and I know how dear old Gottlieb believes in you. If you would
get Gottlieb to back me, to talk to McGurk — Of course in tak-
ing the Directorship I would be making a sacrifice, because I'd
have to give up my research, but I'd be willing because I feel,
really, that somebody with a Tradition ought to carry on the
control. Tubbs is backing me, and if Gottlieb did — I'd see that
it was to Gottlieb's advantage. I'd give him a lot more floor-
space! .

Through the Institute it was vaguely known that Capitola
was advocating the election of Holabird as "the only scientist
here who is also a gentleman." She was seen sailing down corri-
dors, a frigate, with Holabird a sloop in her wake.

But while Holabird beamed, Nicholas Yeo looked secret and
satisfied.

The whole Institute fluttered on the afternoon when the Board
of Trustees met in the Hall, for the election of a Director. They
were turned from investigators into boarding-school girls. The
Board debated, or did something annoying, for draining hours.

At four, Terry Wickett hastened to Martin with, "Say, Slim,
I've got a straight tip that They've elected Silva, dean of the
Winnemac medical school. That's your shop, isn't it? Wha's
like?"

"He's a fine old — No! He and Gottlieb hate each other. Lord!
Gottlieb'll resign, and I'll have to get out. Just when my work's
going nice!"

At five, past doors made of attentive eyes, the Board of Trus-
tees marched to the laboratory of Max Gottlieb.

Holabird was heard saying bravely, "Of course with me, I
wouldn't give my research up for any administrative job." And
Pearl Robbins informed Terry, "Yes, it's true — Mr. McGurk him-

344

self just told me — the Board has elected Dr. Gottlieb the new
Director."

"Then they're fools," said Terry. "He'll refuse it, with wilence.
'Dot dey should ask me to go monkey-skipping mit committee
meetings!' Fat chance!"

When the Board had gone, Martin and Terry flooded into
Gottlieb's laboratory and found the old man standing by his
bench, more erect than they had seen him for years.

"Is it true — they want you to be Director?" panted Martin.

"Yes, they have asked me."

"But you'll refuse? You won't let 'em gum up your work!"

"Veil. ... I said my real work must go on. They consent I
should appoint an Assistant Director to do the detail. You see —
Of course nothing must interfere with my immunology, but dis
gives me the chance to do big t'ings and make a free scientific
institute for all you boys. And those fools at Winnemac that
laughed at my idea of a real medical school, now maybe they
will see — Do you know who was my rival for Director — do
you know who it was, Martin? It was that man Silva! Ha!"

In the corridor Terry groaned, "Requiescat in pace!'

in

To the dinner in Gottlieb's honor (the only dinner that ever
was given in Gottlieb's honor) there came not only the men of
impressive but easy affairs who attend all dinners of honor, but
the few scientists whom Gottlieb admired.

He appeared late, rather shaky, escorted by Martin. When he
reached the speakers' table, the guests rose to him, shouting. He
peered at them, he tried to speak, he held out his long arms as
if to take them all in, and sank down sobbing.

There were cables from Europe; ardent letters from Tubbs
and Dean Silva bewailing their inability to be present; telegrams
from college presidents; and all of these were read to admiring
applause.

But Capitola murmured, "Just the same, we shall miss dear
Dr. Tubbs. He was so forward-looking. Don't play with your
fork, Ross."

So Max Gottlieb took charge of the McGurk Institute of Bi-
ology, and in a month that Institute became a shambles.

345

IV

Gottlieb planned to give only an hour a day to business. As
Assistant Director he appointed Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the epi-
demiologist, the Yonkers churchman and dahlia-fancier. Gottlieb
explained to Martin that, though of course Sholtheis was a fool,
yet he was the only man in sight who combined at least a little
scientific ability with a willingness to endure the routine and
pomposity and compromises of executive work.

By continuing his ancient sneers at all bustling managers,
Gottlieb obviously felt that he excused himself for having be-
come a manager.

He could not confine his official work to an hour a day. There
were too many conferences, too many distinguished callers, too
many papers which needed his signature. He was dragged into
dinner-parties; and the long, vague, palavering luncheons to
which a Director has to go, and the telephoning to straighten
out the dates of these tortures, took nervous hours. Each day
his executive duties crawled into two hours or three or four,
and he raged, he became muddled by complications of personnel
and economy, he was ever more autocratic, more testy; and the
loving colleagues of the Institute, who had been soothed or
bullied into surface peace by Tubbs, now jangled openly.

While he was supposed to radiate benevolence from the office
recently occupied by Dr. A. DeWitt Tubbs, Gottlieb clung to
his own laboratory and to his narrow office as a cat clings to its
cushion under a table. Once or twice he tried to sit and look
impressive in the office of the Director, but he fled from that
large clean vacuity and from Miss Robbins's snapping typewriter
to his own den that smelled not of forward-looking virtue but
only of cigarettes and old papers.

To McGurk, as to every scientific institution, came hundreds
of farmers and practical nurses and suburban butchers who had
paid large fares from Oklahoma or Oregon to get recognition
for the unquestionable cures which they had discovered: oil of
Mississippi catfish which saved every case of tuberculosis, arsenic
pastes guaranteed to cure all cancers. They came with letters
and photographs amid the frayed clean linen in their shabby
suit-cases — at any opportunity they would stoop over their bags
and hopefully bring out testimonials from their Pastors; they

346

begged for a chance to heal humanity, and for themselves only
enough money to send The Girl to musical conservatory. So
certain, so black-crapely beseeching were they that no reception-
clerk could be trained to keep them all out.

Gottlieb found them seeping into his office. He was sorry for
them. They did take his working hours, they did scratch his
belief that he was hard-hearted, but they implored him with
such wretched timorousness that he could not get rid of them
without making promises, and admitting afterward that to have
been more cruel would have been less cruel.

It was the Important People to whom he was rude.

The Directorship devoured enough time and peace to prevent
Gottlieb from going on with the ever more recondite problems
of his inquiry into the nature of specificity, and his inquiry pre-
vented him from giving enough attention to the Institute to
keep it from falling to pieces. He depended on Sholtheis, passed
decisions on to him, but Sholtheis, since in any case Gottlieb
would get all the credit for a successful Directorship, kept up
his own scientific work and passed the decisions to Miss Pearl
Robbins, so that the actual Director was the handsome and
jealous Pearl.

There was no craftier or crookeder Director in the habitable
world. Pearl enjoyed it. She so warmly and modestly assured
Ross McGurk of the merits of Gottlieb and of her timorous
devotion to him, she so purred to the flattery of Rippleton Hola-
bird, she so blandly answered the hoarse hostility of Terry
Wickett by keeping him from getting materials for his work,
that the Institute reeled with intrigue.

Yeo was not speaking to Sholtheis. Terry threatened Holabird
to "paste him one." Gottlieb constantly asked Martin for advice,
and never took it. Joust, the vulgar but competent bio-physicist,
lacking the affection which kept Martin and Terry from re-
proaching the old man, told Gottlieb that he was a "rotten
Director and ought to quit," and was straightway discharged
and replaced by a muffin.

Max Gottlieb had ever discoursed to Martin of "the jests of
the gods." Among these jests Martin had never beheld one so
pungent as this whereby the pretentiousness and fussy unimag-
inativeness which he had detested in Tubbs should have made
him a good manager, while the genius of Gottlieb should have

347

made him a feeble tyrant; the jest that the one thing worse than
a too managed and standardized institution should be one that
was not managed and standardized at all. He would once have
denied it with violence, but nightly now he prayed for Tubbs's
return.

If the business of the Institute was not more complicated
thereby, certainly its placidity was the more disturbed by the
appearance of Gustaf Sondelius, who had just returned from
a study of sleeping sickness in Africa and who noisily took one
of the guest laboratories.

Gustaf Sondelius, the soldier of preventive medicine whose
lecture had sent Martin from Wheatsylvania to Nautilus, had
remained in his gallery of heroes as possessing a little of Gott-
lieb's perception, something of Dad Silva's steady kindliness,
something of Terry's tough honesty though none of his scorn
of amenities, and with these a spicy, dripping richness altogether
his own. It is true that Sondelius did not remember Martin.
Since their evening in Minneapolis he had drunk and debated
and flamboyantly ridden to obscure but vinuous destinations
with too many people. But he was made to remember, and in a
week Sondelius and Terry and Martin were to be seen tramping
and dining, or full of topics and gin at Martin's flat.

Sondelius's wild flaxen hair was almost gray, but he had the
same bull shoulders, the same wide brow, and the same tornado
of plans to make the world aseptic, without neglecting to enjoy
a few of the septic things before they should pass away.

His purpose was, after finishing his sleeping sickness report,
to found a school of tropical medicine in New York.

He besieged McGurk and the wealthy Mr. Minnigen who was
Tubbs's new patron, and in and out of season he besieged Gott-
lieb.

He adored Gottlieb and made noises about it. Gottlieb ad-
mired his courage and his hatred of commercialism, but his
presence Gottlieb could not endure. He was flustered by Son-
delius's hilarity, his compliments, his bounding optimism, his
inaccuracy, his boasting, his oppressive bigness. It may be that
Gottlieb resented the fact that though Sondelius was only eleven
years younger — fifty-eight to Gottlieb's sixty-nine — he seemed
thirty years younger, half a century gayer.

When Sondelius perceived this grudgingness he tried to over-

348

come it by being more noisy and complimentary and enthusi-
astic than ever. On Gottlieb's birthday he gave him a shocking
smoking-jacket of cherry and mauve velvet, and when he called
at Gottlieb's flat, which was often, Gottlieb had to put on the
ghastly thing and sit humming while Sondelius assaulted him
with roaring condemnations of mediocre soup and mediocre
musicians. . . . That Sondelius gave up surprisingly decorative
dinner-parties for these calls, Gottlieb never knew.

Martin turned to Sondelius for courage as he turned to Terry
for concentration. Courage and concentration were needed, in
these days of an Institute gone insane, if a man was to do his
work.

And Martin was doing it.

After a consultation with Gottlieb and a worried conference
with Leora about the danger of handling the germs, he had
gone on to bubonic plague, to the possibilities of preventing it
and curing it with phage.

To have heard him asking Sondelius about his experience in
plague epidemics, one would have believed that Martin found
the Black Death delightful. To have beheld him infecting lean
snaky rats with the horror, all the while clucking to them and
calling them pet names, one would have known him mad.

He found that rats fed with phage failed to come down with
plague; that after phage-feeding, Bacillus pestis disappeared from
carrier rats which, without themselves being killed thereby,
harbored and spread chronic plague; and that, finally, he could
cure the disease. He was as absorbed and happy and nervous
as in the first days of the X Principle. He worked all night. . . .
At the microscope, under a lone light, fishing out with a glass
pipette drawn fine as a hair one single plague bacillus.

To protect himself from infection by the rat-fleas he wore,
while he worked with the animals, rubber gloves, high leather
boots, straps about his sleeves. These precautions thrilled him,
and to the others at McGurk they had something of the esoteric
magic of the alchemists. He became a bit of a hero and a good
deal of a butt. No more than hearty business men in offices or
fussy old men in villages are researchers free from the tedious

349

vice of jovial commenting. The chemists and biologists called
him "The Pest," refused to come to his room, and pretended
to avoid him in the corridors.

As he went fluently on from experiment to experiment, as the
drama of science obsessed him, he thought very well of himself
and found himself taken seriously by the others. He published
one cautious paper on phage in plague, which was mentioned
in numerous scientific journals. Even the harassed Gottlieb was
commendatory, though he could give but little attention and no
help. But Terry Wickett remained altogether cool. He showed
for Martin's somewhat brilliant work only enough enthusiasm
to indicate that he was not jealous; he kept poking in to ask
whether, with his new experimentation, Martin was continuing
his quest for the fundamental nature of all phage, and his study
of physical chemistry.

Then Martin had such an assistant as has rarely been known,
and that assistant was Gustaf Sondelius.

Sondelius was discouraged regarding his school of tropical
medicine. He was looking for new trouble. He had been through
several epidemics, and he viewed plague with affectionate hatred.
When he understood Martin's work he gloated, "Hey, Yesus!
Maybe you got the t'ing that will be better than Yersin or HafT-
kine or anybody! Maybe you cure all the world of plague — the
poor devils in India — millions of them. Let me in!"

He became Martin's collaborator; unpaid, tireless, not very
skillful, valuable in his buoyancy. As well as Martin he loved
irregularity; by principle he never had his meals at the same
hours two days in succession, and by choice he worked all night
and made poetry, rather bad poetry, at dawn.

Martin had always been the lone prowler. Possibly the thing
he most liked in Leora was her singular ability to be cheerfully
non-existent even when she was present. At first he was annoyed
by Sondelius's disturbing presence, however interesting he found
his fervors about plague-bearing rats (whom Sondelius hated not
at all but whom, with loving zeal, he had slaughtered by the
million, with a romantic absorption in traps and poison gas).
But the Sondelius who was raucous in conversation could be
almost silent at work. He knew exactly how to hold the animals
while Martin did intrapleural injections; he made cultures of
Bacillus pestis; when Martin's technician had gone home at but

350

a little after midnight (the garcon liked Martin and thought
well enough of science, but he was prejudiced in favor of six
hours' daily sleep and sometimes seeing his wife and children in
Harlem), then Sondelius cheerfully sterilized glassware and
needles, and lumbered up to the animal house to bring down
victims.

The change whereby Sondelius was turned from Martin's
master to his slave was so unconscious, and Sondelius, for all
his Pickerbaughian love of sensationalism, cared so little about
mastery or credit, that neither of them considered that there
had been a change. They borrowed cigarettes from each other;
they went out at the most improbable hours to have flap-jacks
and coffee at an all-night lunch; and together they candled test-
tubes charged with death.

351

CHAPTER XXXI

FROM Yunnan in China, from the clattering bright bazaars,
crept something invisible in the sun and vigilant by dark,
creeping, sinister, ceaseless; creeping across the Himalayas,
down through walled market-places, across a desert, along hot
yellow rivers, into an American missionary compound — creep-
ing, silent, sure; and here and there on its way a man was black
and stilled with plague.

In Bombay a new dock-guard, unaware of things, spoke bois-
terously over his family rice of a strange new custom of the rats.

Those princes of the sewer, swift to dart and turn, had gone
mad. They came out on the warehouse floor, ignoring the guard,
springing up as though (the guard said merrily) they were try-
ing to fly, and straightway falling dead. He had poked at them,
but they did not move.

Three days later that dock-guard died of the plague.

Before he died, from his dock a ship with a cargo of wheat
steamed or? to Marseilles. There was no sickness on it all the
way; there was no reason why at Marseilles it should not lie
next to a tramp steamer, nor why that steamer, pitching down
to Montevideo with nothing more sensational than a discussion
between the supercargo and the second officer in the matter of
a fifth ace, should not berth near the S.S. Pendown Castle, bound
for the island of St. Hubert to add cocoa to its present cargo of
lumber.

On the way to St. Hubert, a Goanese seedie boy and after him
the messroom steward on the Pendown Castle died of what the
skipper called influenza. A greater trouble was the number of
rats which, ill satisfied with lumber as diet, scampered up to the
food-stores, then into the forecastle, and for no reason perceptible

352

died on the open decks. They danced comically before they
died, and lay in the scuppers stark and ruffled.

So the Pendown Castle came to Blackwater, the capital and
port of St. Hubert.

It is a little isle of the southern West Indies, but St. Hubert
supports a hundred thousand people — English planters and
clerks, Hindu road-makers, Negro cane-hands, Chinese mer-
chants. There is history along its sands and peaks. Here the
buccaneers careened their ships; here the Marquess of Wims-
bury, when he had gone mad, took to repairing clocks and bade
his slaves burn all the sugar-cane.

Hither that peasant beau, Gaston Lopo, brought Madame de
Merlemont, and dwelt in fashionableness till the slaves whom
he had often relished to lash came on him shaving, and straight-
way the lather was fantastically smeared with blood.

Today, St. Hubert is all sugar-cane and Ford cars, oranges and
plantains and the red and yellow pods of cocoa, bananas and
rubber trees and jungles of bamboo, Anglican churches and tin
chapels, colored washerwomen busy at the hollows in the roots
of silk-cotton trees, steamy heat and royal palms and the im-
mortelle that fills the valleys with crimson; today it is all splen-
dor and tourist dullness and cabled cane-quotations, against the
unsparing sun.

Blackwater, flat and breathless town of tin-roofed plaster
houses and incandescent bone-white roads, of salmon-red hibiscus
and balconied stores whose dark depths open without barrier
from the stifling streets, has the harbor to one side and a swamp
to the other. But behind it are the Penrith Hills, on whose
wholesome and palm-softened heights is Government House,
looking to the winking sails.

Here lived in bulky torpor His Excellency the Governor of
St. Hubert, Colonel Sir Robert Fairlamb.

Sir Robert Fairlamb was an excellent fellow, a teller of mess-
room stories, one who in a heathen day never smoked till the
port had gone seven times round; but he was an execrable gov-
ernor and a worried governor. The man whose social rank was
next to his own — the Hon. Cecil Eric George Twyford, a lean,
active, high-nosed despot who owned and knew rod by snake-
writhing rod some ten thousand acres of cane in St. Swithin's
Parish — Twyford said that His Excellency was a "potty and

353

snoring fool/' and versions of the opinion came not too slowly
to Fairlamb. Then, to destroy him complete, the House of
Assembly, which is the St. Hubert legislature, was riven by the
feud of Kellett the Red Leg and George William Vertigan.

The Red Legs were a tribe of Scotch-Irish poor whites who
had come to St. Hubert as indentured servants two hundred
years before. Most of them were still fishermen and plantation-
foremen, but one of them, Kellett, a man small-mouthed and
angry and industrious, had risen from office-boy to owner of a
shipping company, and while his father still spread his nets on
the beach at Point Carib, Kellett was the scourge of the House
of Assembly and a hound for economy — particularly any econ-
omy which would annoy his fellow legislator, George William
Vertigan.

George William, who was sometimes known as "Old Jeo Wm"
and sometimes as "The King of the Ice House" (that enticing
and ruinous bar), had been born behind a Little Bethel in Lan-
cashire. He owned The Blue Bazaar, the hugest stores in St.
Hubert; he caused tobacco to be smuggled into Venezuela; he
was as full of song and incaution and rum as Kellett the Red
Leg was full of figures and envy and decency.

Between them, Kellett and George William split the House
of Assembly. There could be, to a respectable person, no question
as to their merits: Kellett the just and earnest man of domestic-
ity whose rise was an inspiration to youth; George William the
gambler, the lusher, the smuggler, the liar, the seller of shoddy
cottons, a person whose only excellence was his cheap good
nature.

Kellett's first triumph in economy was to pass an ordinance
removing the melancholy Cockney (a player of oboes) who was
the official rat-catcher of St. Hubert.

George William Vertigan insisted in debate, and afterward
privily to Sir Robert Fairlamb, that rats destroy food and per-
haps spread disease, and His Excellency must veto the bill. Sir
Robert was troubled. He called in The Surgeon General, Dr.
R. E. Inchcape Jones (but he preferred to be called Mister, not
Doctor).

Dr. Inchcape Jones was a thin, tall, fretful, youngish man,
without bowels. He had come out from Home only two years
before, and he wanted to go back Home, to that particular part

354

of Home represented by tennis-teas in Surrey. He remarked to
Sir Robert that rats and their ever faithful fleas do carry diseases
— plague and infectious jaundice and rat-bite fever and possibly
leprosy — but these diseases did not and therefore could not exist
in St. Hubert, except for leprosy, which was a natural punish-
ment of outlandish Native Races. In fact, noted Inchcape Jones,
nothing did exist in St. Hubert except malaria, dengue, and a
general beastly dullness, and if Red Legs like Kellett longed to
die of plague and rat-bite fever, why should decent people ob-
ject?

So by the sovereign power of the House of Assembly of St.
Hubert, and of His Excellency the Governor, the Cockney rat-
catcher and his jiggling young colored assistant were com-
manded to cease to exist. The rat-catcher became a chauffeur.
He drove Canadian and American tourists, who stopped over
at St. Hubert for a day or two between Barbados and Trinidad,
along such hill-trails as he considered most easy to achieve with
a second-hand motor, and gave them misinformation regarding
the flowers. The rat-catcher's assistant became a respectable smug-
gler and leader of a Wesleyan choir. And as for the rats them-
selves, they flourished, they were glad in the land, and each
female produced from ten to two hundred offspring every year.

They were not often seen by day. "The rats aren't increasing;
the cats kill 'em," said Kellett the Red Leg. But by darkness
they gamboled in the warehouses and in and out of the schooners
along the quay. They ventured countryward, and lent their fleas
to a species of ground squirrels which were plentiful about the
village of Carib.

A year and a half after the removal of the rat-catcher, when
the Pendown Castle came in from Montevideo and moored by
the Councillor Pier, it was observed by ten thousand glinty small
eyes among the piles.

As a matter of routine, certainly not as a thing connected with
the deaths from what the skipper had called influenza, the crew
of the Pendown Castle put rat-shields on the mooring hawsers,
but they did not take up the gang-plank at night, and now
and then a rat slithered ashore to find among its kin in Black-
water more unctuous fare than hardwood lumber. The Pen-
down sailed amiably for home, and from Avonmouth came to
Surgeon General Inchcape Jones a -:able announcing that the

355

ship was held, that others of the crew had died . . . and died
of plague.

In the curt cablegram the word seemed written in bone-
scorching fire.

Two days before the cable came, a Blackwater lighterman
had been smitten by an unknown ill, very unpleasant, with de-
lirium and buboes. Inchcape Jones said that it could not be
plague, because there never was plague in St. Hubert. His con-
frere, Stokes, retorted that perhaps it couldn't be plague, but it
damn' well was plague.

Dr. Stokes was a wiry, humorless man, the parish medical
officer of St. Swithin Parish. He did not remain in the rustic
reaches of St. Swithin, where he belonged, but snooped all over
the island, annoying Inchcape Jones. He was an M.B. of Edin-
burgh; he had served in the African bush; he had had black-
water fever and cholera and most other reasonable afflictions;
and he had come to St. Hubert only to recover his red blood
corpuscles and to disturb the unhappy Inchcape Jones. He was
not a nice man; he had beaten Inchcape Jones at tennis, with a
nasty, unsporting serve — the sort of serve you'd expect from an
American.

And this Stokes, rather a bounder, a frightful bore, fancied
himself as an amateur bacteriologist! It was a bit thick to have
him creeping about the docks, catching rats, making cultures
from the bellies of their fleas, and barging in — sandy-headed and
red-faced, thin and unpleasant — to insist that they bore plague.

"My dear fellow, there's always some Bacillus pestis among
rats," said Inchcape Jones, in a kindly but airy way.

When the lighterman died, Stokes irritatingly demanded that
it be openly admitted that the plague had come to St. Hubert.

"Even if it was plague, which is not certain," said Inchcape
Jones, "there's no reason to cause a row and frighten everybody.
It was a sporadic case. There won't be any more."

There was more, immediately. In a week three other water-
front workers and a fisherman at Point Carib were down with
something which, even Inchcape Jones acknowledged, was un-
comfortably like the description of plague in "Manson's Tropi-
cal Diseases": "a prodromal stage characterized by depression,
anorexia, aching of the limbs," then the fever, the vertigo, the
haggard features, the bloodshot and sunken eyes, the buboes in

356

the groin. It was not a pretty disease. Inchcape Jones ceased
being chattery and ever so jolly about picnics, and became almost
as grim as Stokes. But publicly he still hoped and denied and
St. Hubert did not know . . . did not know.

ii

To drinking men and wanderers, the pleasantest place in the
rather dull and tin-roofed town of Blackwater is the bar and
restaurant called the Ice House.

It is on the floor above the Kellett Shipping Agency and the
shop where the Chinaman who is supposed to be a graduate of
Oxford sells carved tortoise, and cocoanuts in the horrible like-
ness of a head shrunken by headhunters. Except for the balcony,
where one lunches and looks down on squatting breech-clouted
Hindu beggars, and unearthly pearl-pale English children at
games in the "savannah, all of the Ice House is a large and
dreaming dimness wherein you are but half conscious of Moor-
ish grills, a touch of gilt on white-painted walls, a heavy, amaz-
ingly long mahogany bar, slot machines, and marble-topped
tables beyond your own.

Here, at the cocktail-hour, are all the bloodless, sun-helmeted
white rulers of St. Hubert who haven't quite the caste to belong
to the Devonshire Club: the shipping-office clerks, the merchants
who have no grandfathers, the secretaries to the Inchcape Joneses,
the Italians and Portuguese who smuggle into Venezuela.

Calmed by rum swizzles, those tart and commanding aperitifs
which are made in their deadly perfection only by the twirling
swizzle-sticks of the darkies at the Ice House bar, the exiles
become peaceful, and have another swizzle, and grow certain
again (as for twenty-four hours, since the last cocktail-hour,
they have not been certain) that next year they will go Home.
Yes, they will taper off, take exercise in the dawn coolness, stop
drinking, become strong and successful, and go Home . . . the
Lotus Eaters, tears in their eyes when in the dimness of the
Ice House they think of Piccadilly or the heights of Quebec, of
Indiana or Catalonia or the clogs of Lancashire. . . . They never
go Home. But always they have new reassuring cocktail-hours
at the Ice House, until they die, and the other lost men come

357

to their funerals and whisper one to another that they are going
Home.

Now of the Ice House, George William Vertigan, owner of
The Blue Bazaar, was unchallenged monarch. He was a thick,
ruddy man, the sort of Englishman one sees in the Midlands,
the sort that is either very Non-Conformist or very alcoholic, and
George William was not Non-Conformist. Each day from five
to seven he was tilted against the bar, never drunk, never alto-
gether sober, always full of melody and kindliness; the one man
who did not long for Home, because outside the Ice House he
remembered no home.

When it was whispered that a man had died of something
which might be plague, George William announced to his court
that if it were true, it would serve Kellett the Red Leg jolly
well right. But everyone knew that the West Indian climate pre-
vented plague.

The group, quivering on the edge of being panicky, were
reassured.

It was two nights afterward that there writhed into the Ice
House a rumor that George William Vertigan was dead.

in

No one dared speak of it, whether in the Devonshire Club or
the Ice House or the breeze-fluttered, sea-washed park where
the Negroes gather after working hours, but they heard, almost
without hearing, of this death — and this— and another. No one
liked to shake hands with his oldest friend; everyone fled from
everyone else, though the rats loyally stayed with them; and
through the island galloped the Panic, which is more murderous
than its brother, the Plague.

Still there was no quarantine, no official admission. Inchca^e
Jones vomited feeble proclamations on the inadvisability of too-
large public gatherings, and wrote to London to inquire about
Haffkine's prophylactic, but to Sir Robert Fairlamb he protested,
"Honestly, there's only been a few deaths, and I think it's all
passed over. As for these suggestions of Stokes that we burn the
village of Carib, merely because they've had several cases — why,
it's barbarous! And it's been conveyed to me that if we were
to establish a quarantine, the merchants would take the strongest

358

measures against the administration. It would ruin the tourist
and export business."

But Stokes of St. Swithin's secredy wrote to Dr. Max Gottlieb,
Director of the McGurk Institute, that the plague was ready to
flare up and consume all the West Indies, and would Dr. Gott-
lieb do something about it?

359

CHAPTER XXXII

THERE may have been in the shadowy heart of Max Gott-
lieb a diabolic insensibility to divine pity, to suffering
humankind; there may have been mere resentment of the
doctors who considered his science of value only as it was handy
to advertising their business of healing; there may have been
the obscure and passionate and unscrupulous demand of genius
for privacy. Certainly he who had lived to study the methods
of immunizing mankind against disease had little interest in
actually using those methods. He was like a fabulous painter, so
contemptuous of popular taste that after a lifetime of creation
he should destroy everything he had done, lest it be marred and
mocked by the dull eyes of the crowd.

The letter from Dr. Stokes was not his only intimation that
plague was striding through St. Hubert, that tomorrow it might
be leaping to Barbados, to the Virgin Islands ... to New York.
Ross McGurk was an emperor of the new era, better served
than any cloistered satrap of old. His skippers looked in at a
hundred ports; his railroads penetrated jungles; his correspond-
ents whispered to him of the next election in Colombia, of the
Cuban cane-crop, of what Sir Robert Fairlamb had said to Dr.
R. E. Inchcape Jones on his bungalow porch. Ross McGurk, and
after him Max Gottlieb, knew better than did the Lotus Eaters
of the Ice House how much plague there wac in St. Hubert.

Yet Gottlieb did not move, but pondered the unknown chem-
ical structure of antibodies, interrupted by questions as to
whether Pearl Robbins had enough pencils, whether it would
be quite all right for Dr. Holabird to receive the Lettish scientific
mission this afternoon, so that Dr. Sholtheis might attend the
Anglican Conference on the Reservation of the Host.
He was assailed by inquirers: public health officials, one Dr.

360

Almus Pickerbaugh, a congressman who was said to be popular
in Washington, Gustaf Sondelius, and a Martin Arrowsmith
who could not (whether because he was too big or too small)
quite attain Gottlieb's concentrated indifference.

It was rumored that Arrowsmith of McGurk had something
which might eradicate plague. Letters demanded of Gottlieb,
"Can you stand by, with the stuff of salvation in your hands,
and watch thousands of these unfortunate people dying in St.
Hubert, and what is more, are you going to let the dreaded
plague gain a foothold in the Western hemisphere? My dear
man, this is the time to come out of your scientific reverie and
act!"

Then Ross McGurk, over a comfortable steak, hinted, not too
diffidently, that this was the opportunity for the Institute to
acquire world-fame.

Whether it was the compulsion of McGurk or the demands
of the public-spirited, or whether Gottlieb's own imagination
aroused enough to visualize the far-oflf misery of the blacks in
the caneflelds, he summoned Martin and remarked:

"It comes to me that there is pneumonic plague in Manchuria
and bubonic in St. Hubert, in the West Indies. If I could trust
you, Martin, to use the phage with only half your patients and
keep the others as controls, under normal hygienic conditions
but without the phage, then you could make an absolute deter-
mination of its value, as complete as what we have of mosquito
transmission of yellow fever, and then I would send you down
to St. Hubert. What do you t'ink?"

Martin swore by Jacques Loeb that he would observe test
conditions; he would determine forever the value of phage by
the contrast between patients treated and untreated, and so, per-
haps, end all plague forever; he would harden his heart and
keep clear his eyes.

"We will get Sondelius to go along," said Gottlieb. "He will
do the big boom-boom and so bring us the credit in the news-
papers which, I am now told, a Director must obtain."

Sondelius did not merely consent — he insisted.

Martin had never seen a foreign country — he could not think
of Canada, where he had spent a vacation as hotel-waiter, as
foreign to him. He could not comprehend that he was really
going to a place of palm trees and brown faces and languid

361

Christmas Eves. He was busy (while Sondelius was out order-
ing linen suits and seeking a proper new sun helmet) making
anti-plague phage on a large scale: a hundred liters of it, sealed
in tiny ampules. He felt like the normal Martin, but conferences
and powers were considering him.

There was a meeting of the Board of Trustees to advise
Martin and Sondelius as to their methods. For it the President
of the University of Wilmington gave up a promising interview
with a millionaire alumnus, Ross McGurk gave up a game of
golf, and one of the three university scientists arrived by aero-
plane. Called in from the laboratory, a rather young man in a
wrinkled soft collar, dizzy still with the details of Erlenmeyer
flasks, infusorial earth, and sterile filters, Martin was confronted
by the Men of Measured Merriment, and found that he was no
longer concealed in the invisibility of insignificance but regarded
as a leader who was expected not only to produce miracles but
to explain beforehand how important and mature and miracu-
lous he was.

He was shy before the spectacled gravity of the five Trustees
as they sat, like a Supreme Court, at the dais table in Bonanza
Hall — Gottlieb a little removed, also trying to look grave and
supreme. But Sondelius rolled in, enthusiastic and tremendous,
and suddenly Martin was not shy, nor was he respectful to his
one-time master in public health.

Sondelius wanted to exterminate all the rodents in St. Hubert,
to enforce a quarantine, to use Yersin's serum and Haffkine's
prophylactic, and to give Martin's phage to everybody in St.
Hubert, all at once, all with everybody.

Martin protested. For the moment it might have been Gottlieb
speaking.

He knew, he flung at them, that humanitarian feeling would
make it impossible to use the poor devils of sufferers as mere
objects of experiment, but he must have at least a few real test
cases, and he was damned, even before the Trustees he was
damned, if he would have his experiment so mucked up by
multiple treatment that they could never tell whether the cures
were due to Yersin or HafTkine or phage or none of them.

The Trustees adopted his plan. After all, while they desired
to save humanity, wasn't it better to have it saved by a McGurk

362

representative than by Yersin or Haffkine or the outlandish
Sondelius :

It was agreed that if Martin could find in St. Hubert a district
which was comparatively untouched by the plague, he should
there endeavor to have test cases, one half injected with phage,
one half untreated. In the badly afflicted districts, he might give
the phage to everyone, and if the disease slackened unusually,
that would be a secondary proof.

Whether the St. Hubert government, since they had not asked
for aid, would give Martin power to experiment and Sondelius
police authority, the Trustees did not know. The Surgeon Gen-
eral, a chap named Inchcape Jones, had replied to their cables:
"No real epidemic not need help." But McGurk promised that
he would pull his numerous wires to have the McGurk Com-
mission (Chairman, Martin Arrowsmith, B.A., M.D.) welcomed
by the authorities.

Sondelius still insisted that in this crisis mere experimentation
was heartless, yet he listened to Martin's close-reasoned fury with
enthusiasm which this bull-necked eternal child had for any-
thing which sounded new and preferably true. He did not, like
Almus Pickerbaugh, regard a difference of scientific opinion as
an attack on his character.

He talked of going on his own, independent of Martin and
McGurk, but he was won back when the Trustees murmured
that though they really did wish the dear man wouldn't fool
with sera, they would provide him with apparatus to kill all the
rats he wanted.

Then Sondelius was happy:

"And you watch me! I am the captain-general of rat-killers!
I yoost walk into a warehouse and the rats say, 'There's that
damn' old Uncle Gustaf — what's the use?' and they turn up
their toes and die! I am yoost as glad I have you people behind
me, because I am broke — I went and bought some oil stock
that don't look so good now — and I shall need a lot of hydro-
cyanic acid gas. Oh, those rats! You watch me! Now I go and
telegraph I can't keep a lecture engagement next week — huh!
me to lecture to a women's college, me that can talk rat-language
and know seven beautiful deadly kind of traps!"

363

Martin had never known greater peril than swimming a flood
as a hospital intern. From waking to midnight he was too busy
making phage and receiving unsolicited advice from all the
Institute staff to think of the dangers of a plague epidemic, but
when he went to bed, when his brain was still revolving with
plans, he pictured rather too well the chance of dying, unpleas-
antly.

When Leora received the idea that he was going off to a
death-haunted isle, to a place of strange ways and trees and
faces (a place, probably, where they spoke funny languages and
didn't have movies or tooth-paste), she took the notion secre-
tively away with her, to look at it and examine it, precisely as
she often stole little foods from the table and hid them and
meditatively ate them at odd hours of the night, with the pleased
expression of a bad child. Martin was glad that she did not add
to his qualms by worrying. Then, after three days, she spoke:

"I'm going with you."

"You are not!"

"Well. ... I am!"

"It's not safe."

"Silly! Of course it is. You can shoot your nice old phage
into me, and then I'll be absolutely all right. Oh, I have a hus-
band who cures things, I have! I'm going to blow in a lot of
money for thin dresses, though I bet St. Hubert isn't any hotter
than Dakota can be in August."

"Listen! Lee, darling! Listen! I do think the phage will im-
munize against the plague — you bet I'll be mighty well injected
with it myself! — but I don't kjiow, and even if it were practi-
cally perfect, there'd always be some people it wouldn't protect.
You simply can't go, sweet. Now I'm terribly sleepy — "

Leora seized his lapels, as comic fierce as a boxing kitten, but
her eyes were not comic, nor her wailing voice; age-old wail of
the soldiers' women:

"Sandy, don't you know I haven't any life outside of you?
I might've had, but honestly, I've been glad to let you absorb me.
I'm a lazy, useless, ignorant scut, except as maybe I keep you
comfortable. If you were off there, and I didn't know you were
all right, or if you died and somebody else cared for your body

364

that I've loved so — haven't I loved it, dear?— I'd go mad. I mean
it— can't you see I mean it — I'd go mad! It's just — I'm you, and
I got to be with you. And I will help you! Make your media
and everything. You know how often I've helped you. Oh, I'm
not much good at McGurk, with all your awful' complicated
jiggers, but I did help you at Nautilus— I did help you, didn't
I?— and maybe in St. Hubert" — her voice was the voice of
women in midnight terror — "maybe you won't find anybody
that can help you even my little bit, and I'll cook and every-
thing—"

"Darling, don't make it harder for me. Going to be hard
enough in any case — "

"Damn you, Sandy Arrowsmith, don't you dare use those old
stuck-up expressions that husbands have been drooling out to
wives forever and ever! I'm not a wife, any more'n you're a
husband. You're a rotten husband! You neglect me absolutely.
The only time you know what I've got on is when some dog-
gone button slips — and how they can pull off when a person
has gone over 'em and sewed 'em all on again is simply beyond
me!— and then you bawl me out. But I don't care. I'd rather
have you than any decent husband. . . . Besides. I'm going."

Gottlieb opposed it, Sondelius roared about it, Martin worried
about it, but Leora went, and — his only act of craftiness as Di-
rector of the Institute — Gottlieb made her "Secretary and Tech-
nical Assistant to the McGurk Plague and Bacteriophage Com-
mission to the Lesser Antilles," and blandly gave her a salary.

in

The day before the Commission sailed, Martin insisted that
Sondelius take his first injection of phage. He refused.

"No, I will not touch it till you. get converted to humanity,
Martin, and give it to everybody in St. Hubert. And you will!
Wait till you see them suffering by the thousand. You have not
seen such a thing. Then you will forget science and try to save
everybody. You shall not inject me till you will inject all my
Negro friends down there too."

That afternoon Gottlieb called Martin in. He spoke with hesi-
tation :

"You're off for Blackwater tomorrow."

365

"Yes, sir."

"Hm. You may be gone some time. I — Martin, you are my
oldest friend in New York, you and the good Miriam. Tell me:
At first you and Terry t'ought I should not take up the Director-
ship. Don't you now t'ink I was wise?"

Martin stared, then hastily he lied and said that which was
comforting and expected.

"I am glad you t'ink so. You have known so long what I
have tried to do. I haf faults, but I t'ink I begin to see a real
scientific note coming into the Institute at last, after the popoo-
larity-chasing of Tubbs and Holabird. ... I wonder how I can
discharge Holabird, that pants-presser of science? If only he dit
not know Capitola so well — socially, they call it! But anyway —

"There are those that said Max Gottlieb could not do the
child job of running an institution. Huh! Buying note-books!
Hiring women that sweep floors! Or no — the floors are swept by
women hired by the superintendent of the building, nicht wahr?
But anyway —

"I did not make a rage when Terry and you doubted. I am
*a great fellow for allowing everyone his opinion. But it pleases
me — I am very fond of you two boys — the only real sons I
have — " Gottlieb laid his withered hand on Martin's arm. "It
pleases me that you see now I am beginning to make a real
scientific Institute. Though I have enemies. Martin, you would
t'ink I was joking if I told you the plotting against me —

"Even Yeo. I t'ought he was my friend. I t'ought he was a
real biologist. But just today he comes to me and says he cannot
get enough sea-urchins for his experiments. As if I could make
sea-urchins out of thin air! He said I keep him short of all
materials. Me! That have always stood for — I do not care what
they pay scientists, but always I have stood, against that fool
Silva and all of them, all my enemies —

"You do not know how many enemies I have, Martin! They
do not dare show their faces. They smile to me, but they whis-
per— I will show Holabird — always he plot against me and try
to win over Pearl Robbins, but she is a good girl, she knows
what I am doing, but — "

He looked perplexed; he peered at Martin as though he did
not quite recognize him, and begged:

"Martin, I grow old — not in years — it is a lie I am over seventy

366 .

— but I have my worries. Do you mind if I give you advice as
I have done so often, so many years? Though you are not a
schoolboy now in Queen City — no, at Winnemac it was. You
are a man and you are a genuine worker. But —

"Be sure you do not let anything, not even your own good
kind heart, spoil your experiment at St. Hubert. I do not make
funniness about humanitarianism as I used to; sometimes now
I t'ink the vulgar and contentious human race may yet have as
much grace and good taste as the cats. But if this is to be, there
must be knowledge. So many men, Martin, are kind and neigh-
borly; so few have added to knowledge. You have the chance!
You may be the man who ends all plague, and maybe old Max
Gottlieb will have helped, too, hein, maybe?

"You must not be just a good doctor at St. Hubert. You must
pity, oh, so much the generation after generation yet to come
that you can refuse to let yourself indulge in pity for the men
you will see dying.

"Dying. ... It will be peace.

"Let nothing, neither beautiful pity nor fear of your own
death, keep you from making this plague experiment complete.
And as my friend — If you do this, something will yet have
come out of my Directorship. If but one fine thing could come,
to justify me — "

When Martin came sorrowing into his laboratory he found
Terry Wickett waiting.

"Say, Slim," Terry blurted, "just wanted to butt in and sug-
gest, now for St. Gottlieb's sake keep your phage notes complete
and up-to-date, and keep 'em in ink!"

"Terry, it looks to me as if you thought I had a fine chance
of not coming back with the notes myself."

"Aw, what's biting you!" said Terry feebly.

IV

The epidemic in St. Hubert must have increased, for on the
day before the McGurk Commission sailed, Dr. Inchcape Jones
declared that the island was quarantined. People might come in,
but no one could leave. He did this despite the fretting of the
Governor, Sir Robert Fairlamb, and the protests of the hotel-
keepers who fed on tourists, the ex-rat-catchers who drove the

367

same, Kellett the Red Leg who sold them tickets, and all the
other representatives of sound business in St. Hubert.

Besides his ampules of phage and his Luer syringes for injec-
tion, Martin made personal preparations for the tropics. He
bought, in seventeen minutes, a Palm Beach suit, two new shirts,
and, as St. Hubert was a British possession and as he had heard
that all Britishers carry canes, a stick which the shop-keeper
guaranteed to be as good as genuine malacca.

VI

They started, Martin and Leora and Gustaf Sondelius, on
a winter morning, on the six-thousand-ton steamer St. Buryan
of the McGurk Line, which carried machinery and flour and
codfish and motors to the Lesser Antilles and brought back
molasses, cocoa, avocados, Trinidad asphalt. A score of winter
tourists made the round trip, but only a score, and there was
little handkerchief-waving.

The McGurk Line pier was in South Brooklyn, in a district
of brown anonymous houses. The sky was colorless above dirty
snow. Sondelius seemed well content. As they drove upon a
wharf littered with hides and boxes and disconsolate steerage
passengers, he peered out of their crammed taxicab and an-
nounced that the bow of the St. Buryan — all they could see of
it — reminded him of the Spanish steamer he had taken to the
Cape Verde Isles. But to Martin and Leora, who had read of the
drama of departure, of stewards darting with masses of flowers,
dukes and divorcees being interviewed, and bands playing "The
Star-spangled Banner," the St. Buryan was unromantic and its
ferry-like casualness was discouraging.

Only Terry came to see them off, bringing a box of candy for
Leora.

Martin had never ridden a craft larger than a motor launch.
He stared up at the black wall of the steamer's side. As they
mounted the gangplank he was conscious that he was cutting
himself off from the safe, familiar land, and he was embarrassed
by the indifference of more experienced-looking passengers, star-

368

ing down from the rail. Aboard, it seemed to him that th*
forward deck looked like the backyard of an old-iron dealer,
that the St. Buryan leaned too much to one side, and that even
in the dock she swayed undesirably.

The whistle snorted contemptuously; the hawsers were cast
off. Terry stood on the pier till the steamer, with Martin and
Leora and Sondelius above him, their stomachs pressed against
the rail, had slid past him, then he abruptly clumped away.

Martin realized that he was off for the perilous sea and the
perilous plague; that there was no possibility of leaving the
ship till they should reach some distant island. This narrow
deck, with its tarry lines between planks, was his only home.
Also, in the breeze across the wide harbor he was beastly cold,
and in general God help him!

As the St. Buryan was warped out into the river, as Martin
was suggesting to his Commission, "How about going down-
stairs and seeing if we can raise a drink?" there was the sound
of a panicky taxicab on the pier, the sight of a lean, tall figure
running — but so feebly, so shakily — and they realized that it
was Max Gottlieb, peering for them, tentatively raising his thin
arm in greeting, not finding them in the line at the rail, and
turning sadly away.

VII

As representatives of Ross McGurk and his various works,
evil and benevolent, they had the two suites de luxe on the boat
deck.

Martin was cold off snow-blown Sandy Hook, sick off Cape
Hatteras, and tired and relaxed between; with him Leora was
cold, and in a ladylike manner she was sick, but she was not
at all tired. She insisted on conveying information to him, from
the West Indian guide-book which she had earnestly bought.

Sondelius was conspicuously all over the ship. He had tea
with the Captain, scouse with the fo'c'sle, and intellectual con-
ferences with the Negro missionary in the steerage. He was to
be heard — always he was to be heard: singing on the promenade
deck, defending Bolshevism against the boatswain, arguing oil-
burning with the First Officer, and explaining to the bar stew-
ard how to make a gin sling. He held a party for the children

369

in the steerage, and he borrowed from the First Officer a volume
of navigation to study between parties.

He gave flavor to the ordinary cautious voyage of the St.
Buryan, but he made a mistake. He was courteous to Miss
Gwilliam; he tried to cheer her on a seemingly lonely adventure.

Miss Gwilliam came from one of the best families in her
section of New Jersey; her father was a lawyer and a church-
warden, her grandfather had been a solid farmer. That she had
not married, at thirty-three, was due entirely to the preference
of modern young men for jazz-dancing hussies; and she was
not only a young lady of delicate reservations but also a singer;
in fact, she was going to the West Indies to preserve the wonders
of primitive art for reverent posterity in the native ballads she
would collect and sing to a delighted public — if only she learned
how to sing.

She studied Gustaf Sondelius. He was a silly person, not in
the least like the gentlemanly insurance-agents and office-man-
agers she was accustomed to meet at the country club, and what
was worse, he did not ask her opinions on art and good form.
His stories about generals and that sort of people could be dis-
counted as lies, for did he not associate with grimy engineers?
He needed some of her gentle but merry chiding.

When they stood together at the rail and he chanted in his
ludicrous up-and-down Swedish sing-song that it was a fine eve-
ning, she remarked, "Well, Mr. Roughneck, have you been up
to something smart again today ? Or have you been giving some-
body else a chance to talk, for once?"

She was placidly astonished when he clumped away with
none of the obedient reverence which any example of cultured
American womanhood has a right to expect from all males, even
foreigners.

Sondelius came to Martin lamenting, "Slim — if I may call you
so, like Terry — I think you and your Gottlieb are right. There
is no use saving fools. It's a great mistake to be natural. One
should always be a stuffed shirt, like old Tubbs. Then one would
have respect even from artistic New Jersey spinsters. . . . How
strange is conceit! That I who have been cursed and beaten by
so many Great Ones, who was once led out to be shot in a
Turkish prison, should never have been annoyed by them as
by this smug wench. Ah, smugness! That is the enemy!"

370

Apparently he recovered from Miss Gwilliam. He was seen
arguing with the ship's doctor about sutures in Negro skulls,
and he invented a game of deck cricket. But one evening when
he sat reading in the "social hall," stooped over, wearing betray-
ing spectacles and his mouth puckered, Martin walked past the
window and incredulously saw that Sondelius was growing old.

VIII

As he sat by Leora in a deck-chair, Martin studied her, really
looked at her pale profile, after years when she had been a matter
of course. He pondered on her as he pondered on phage; he
weightily decided that he had neglected her, and weightily he
started right in to be a good husband.

"Now I have a chance to be human, Lee, I realize how lonely
vou must have been in New York."

"But I haven't."

"Don't be foolish! Of course you've been lonely! Well, when
we get back, I'll take a little time ofif every day and we'll — we'll
have walks and go to the movies and everything. And I'll send
you flowers, every morning. Isn't it a relief to just sit here! But
I do begin to think and realize how I've prob'ly neglected —
Tell me, honey, has it been too terribly dull?"

"Hunka. Really."

"No, but tell me."

"There's nothing to tell."

"Now hang it, Leora, here when I do have the first chance
in eleven thousand years to think about you, and I come right
out frankly and admit how slack I've been — And planning to
send you flowers — "

"You look here, Sandy Arrowsmith! Quit bullying me! You
want the luxury of harrowing yourself by thinking what a poor,
bawling, wretched, ftory-book wife I am. You're working up to
become perfectly miserable if you can't enjoy being miser-
able. ... It would be terrible, when we got back to New York,
if you did get on the job and devoted yourself to showing me
a good time. You'd go at it like a bull. I'd have to be so dratted
grateful for the flowers every day — the days you didn't forget! —
and the way you'd sling me off to the movies when I wanted
to stay home and snooze — "

371

"Well, by thunder, of all the—"

"No, please ! You're dear and good, but you're so bossy that
I've always got to be whatever you want, even if it's lonely.
But — Maybe I'm lazy. I'd rather just snoop around than have
to work at being well-dressed and popular and all those jobs. I
fuss over the flat — hang it, wish I'd had the kitchen repainted
while we're away, it's a nice little kitchen — and I make believe
read my French books, and go out for a walk, and look in the
windows, and eat an ice cream soda, and the day slides by.
Sandy, I do love you awful' much; if I could, I'd be as ill-
treated as the dickens, so you could enjoy it, but I'm no good at
educated lies, only at easy little ones like the one I told you last
week — I said I hadn't eaten any candy and didn't have a stom-
ach-ache, and I'd eaten half a pound and I was sick as a
pup. . . . Gosh, I'm a good wife I am!"

They rolled from gray seas to purple and silver. By dusk they
stood at the rail, and he felt the spaciousness of the sea, of life.
Always he had lived in his imagination. As he had blundered
through crowds, an inconspicuous young husband trotting out
to buy cold roast beef for dinner, his brain-pan had been wide
as the domed sky. He had seen not the streets, but microorgan-
isms large as jungle monsters, miles of flasks cloudy with bac-
teria, himself giving orders to his garcon, Max Gottlieb awe-
somely congratulating him. Always his dreams had clung about
his work. Now, no less passionately, he awoke to the ship, the
mysterious sea, the presence of Leora, and he cried to her, in the
warm tropic winter dusk:

"Sweet, this is only the first of our big hikes! Pretty soon, if
I'm successful in St. Hubert, I'll begin to count in science, and
we'll go abroad, to your France and England and Italy and
everywhere!"

"Can we, do you think? Oh, Sandy! Going places!"

IX

He never knew it but for an hour, in their cabin half-lighted
from the lamps in their sitting-room beyond, she watched him
sleeping.

He was not handsome; he was grotesque as a puppy napping
on a hot afternoon. His hair was ruffled, his face was deep in

372

the crumpled pillow he had encircled with both his arms. She
looked at him, smiling, with the stretched corners of her lips
like tiny flung arrows.

"I do love him so when he's frowsy! Don't you see, Sandy,
I was wise to come! You're so worn out. It might get you, and
nobody but me could nurse you. Nobody knows all your cranky
ways — about how you hate prunes and everything. Night and
day I'll nurse you — the least whisper and I'll be awake. And if
you need ice bags and stuff — And I'll have ice, too, if I have
to sneak into some millionaire's house and steal it out of his
highballs! My dear!"

She shifted the electric fan so that it played more upon him,
and on soft toes she crept into their stiff sitting-room. It did not
contain much save a round table, a few chairs, and a Sybaritic
glass and mahogany wall-cabinet whose purpose was never dis-
covered.

"It's so sort of— Aah! Pinched. I guess maybe I ought to fix
it up somehow."

But she had no talent for the composing of chairs and pictures
which brings humanness into a dead room. Never in her life
had she spent three minutes in arranging flowers. She looked
doubtful, she smiled and turned out the light, and slipped in to
him.

She lay on the coverlet of her berth, in the tropic languidness,
a slight figure in a frivolous nightgown. She thought, "I like a
small bedroom, because Sandy is nearer and I don't get so
scared by things. What a dratted bully the man is! Some day
I'm going to up and say to him: 'You go to the devil!' I will so!
Darling, we will hike ofl to France together, just you and I,

won't we!

She was asleep, smiling, so thin a little figure — -

373

CHAPTER XXXIII

MISTY mountains they saw, and on their flanks the palm-
crowned fortifications built of old time against the
pirates. In Martinique were white-faced houses like
provincial France, and a boiling market full of colored women
with kerchiefs ultramarine and scarlet. They passed hot St.
Lucia, and Saba that is all one lone volcano. They devoured
paw-paws and breadfruit and avocados, bought from cofree-
colored natives who came alongside in nervous small boats; they
felt the languor of the isles, and panted before they approached
Barbados.

Just beyond was St. Hubert.

None of the tourists had known of the quarantine. They were
raging that the company should have taken them into danger.
In the tepid wind they felt the plague.

The skipper reassured them, in a formal address. Yes, they
would stop at Blackwater, the port of St. Hubert, but they
would anchor far out in the harbor; and while the passengers
bound for St. Hubert would be permitted to go ashore, in the
port-doctor's launch, no one in St. Hubert would be allowed to
leave — nothing from that pest-hole would touch the steamer
except the official mail, which the ship's surgeon would dis-
infect.

(The ship's surgeon was wondering, the while, how you dis-
infected mail — let's see — sulfur burning in the presence of mois-
ture, wasn't it?)

The skipper had been trained in oratory by arguments with
wharf-masters, and the tourists were reassured. But Martin mur-
mured to his Commission, "I hadn't thought of that. Once we

374

go ashore, we'll be practically prisoners tul trie epidemic's over —
j£ it ever does get over — prisoners with the plague around us."
"Why, of course!" said Sondelius.

ii

They left Bridgetown, the pleasant port of Barbados, by after-
noon. It was late night, with most of the passengers asleep,
when they arrived at Blackwater. As Martin came out on the
damp and vacant deck, it seemed unreal, harshly unfriendly, and
of the coming battleground he saw nothing but a few shore
lights beyond uneasy water.

About their arrival there was something timorous and illicit.
The ship's surgeon ran up and down, looking disturbed; the
captain could be heard growling on the bridge; the first officer
hastened up to confer with him and disappeared below again;
and there was no one to meet them. The steamer waited, rolling
in a swell, while from the shore seemed to belch a hot miasma.

"And here's where we're going to land and stay!" Martin
grunted to Leora, as they stood by their bags, their cases of
phage, on the heaving, black-shining deck near the top of the
accommodation-ladder.

Passengers came out in dressing-gowns, chattering, "Yes, this
must be the place, those lights there. Must be fierce. What?
Somebody going ashore? Oh, sure, those two doctors. Well, they
got nerve. I certainly don't envy them!"

Martin heard.

From shore a pitching light made toward the ship, slid round
the bow, and sidled to the bottom of the accommodation-ladder.
In the haze of a lantern held by a steward at the foot of the
steps, Martin could see a smart covered launch, manned by darky
sailors in naval uniform and glazed black straw hats with rib-
bons, and commanded by a Scotch-looking man with some sort
of a peaked uniform cap over a civilian jacket.

The captain clumped down the swinging steps beside the ship.
While the launch bobbed, its wet canvas top glistening, he had
a long and complaining conference with the commander of the
launch, and received a pouch of mail, the only thing to come
aboard.

The ship's surgeon took it from the captain with aversior,

375

grumbling, "Now where can I get a barrel to disinfect these
darn' letters in?"

Martin and Leora and Sondelius waited, without option.

They had been joined by a thin woman in black whom they
had not seen all the trip — one of the mysterious passengers who
are never noticed till they come on deck at landing. Apparently
she was going ashore. She was pale, her hands twitching.

The captain shouted at them, "All right — all right — all right!
You can go now. Hustle, please. I've got to get on. . . . Damn'
nuisance."

The St. Buryan had not seemed large or luxurious, but it was
a castle, steadfast among storms, its side a massy wall, as Martin
crept down the swaying stairs, thinking all at once, "We're in
for it; like going to the scaffold — they lead you along — no chance
to resist," and, "You're letting your imagination run away with
you; quit it now!" and, "Is it too late to make Lee stay behind,
on the steamer?" and an agonized, "Oh, Lord, are the stewards
handling that phage carefully?" Then he was on the tiny square
platform at the bottom of the accommodation-ladder, the ship's
side was high above him, lit by the round ports of cabins, and
someone was helping him into the launch.

As the unknown woman in black came aboard, Martin saw
in lantern light how her lips tightened once, then her whole
face went blank, like one who waited hopelessly.

Leora squeezed his hand, hard, as he helped her in.

He muttered, while the steamer whistled, "Quick! You can
still go back! You must!"

"And leave the pretty launch? Why, Sandy! Just look at the
elegant engine it's got! . . . Gosh, I'm scared blue!"

As the launch sputtered, swung round, and headed for the
filtering of lights ashore, as it bowed its head and danced to
the swell, the sandy-headed official demanded of Martin:

"You're the McGurk Commission?"

"Yes."

"Good." He sounded pleased yet cold, a busy voice and humor-
less.

"Are you the port-doctor?" asked Sondelius.

"No, not exactly. I'm Dr. Stokes, of St. Swithin's Parish.
We're all of us almost everything, nowadays. The port-doctor —
In fad: he died couple of days ago."

376

Martin grunted. But his imagination had ceased to agitate him.

"You're Dr. Sondelius, I imagine. I know your work in Africa,
in German East — was out there myself. And you're Dr. Arrow-
smith? I read your plague phage paper. Much impressed. Now
I have just the chance to say before we go ashore — You'll both
be opposed. Inchcape Jones, the S.G., has lost his head. Running
in circles, lancing buboes — afraid to burn Carib, where most of
the infection is. Arrowsmith, I have a notion of what you may
want to do experimentally. If Inchcape balks, you come to me
in my parish — if I'm still alive. Stokes, my name is. . . . Damn
it, boy, what are you doing? Trying to drift clear down to
Venezuela? . . . Inchcape and H.E. are so afraid that they won't
even cremate the bodies — some religious prejudice among the
blacks — obee or something."

"I see," said Martin.

"How many cases plague you got now?" said Sondelius.

"Lord knows. Maybe a thousand. And ten million rats. . . .
I'm so sleepy! . . . Well, welcome, gentlemen — " He flung out
his arms in a dry hysteria. "Welcome to the Island of Hesper-
ides!"

Out of darkness Blackwater swung toward them, low flimsy
barracks on a low swampy plain stinking of slimy mud. Most
of the town was dark, dark and wickedly still. There was no
face along the dim waterfront — warehouses, tram station, mean
hotels — and they ground against a pier, they went ashore, with-
out attention from customs officials. There were no carriages,
and the hotel-runners who once had pestered tourists landing
from the St. Bury an, whatever the hour, were dead now or
hidden.

The thin mysterious woman passenger vanished, staggering
with her suit-case — she had said no word, and they never saw
her again. The Commission, with Stokes and the harbor-police
who had manned the launch, carried the baggage (Martin
weaving with a case of the phage) through the rutty balconied
streets to the San Marino Hotel.

Once or twice faces, disembodied things with frightened lips,
stared at them from alley-mouths; and when they came to the
hotel, when they stood before it, a weary caravan laden with
bags and boxes, the bulging-eyed manageress peered from a
window before she would admit them.

377

As they entered, Martin saw under a street light the first stir-
ling of life: a crying woman and a bewildered child following
en open wagon in which were heaped a dozen stiff bodies.

"And I might have saved all of them, with phage," he whis-
pered to himself.

His forehead was cold, yet it was greasy with sweat as he
babbled to the manageress of rooms and meals, as he prayed
that Leora might not have seen the Things in that slow creaking
wagon.

"I'd have choked her before I let her come, if I'd known," he
was shuddering.

The woman apologized, "I must ask you gentlemen to carry
your things up to your rooms. Our boys — They aren't here any
more."

What became of the walking stick which, in such pleased
vanity, Martin had bought in New York, he never knew. He
was too busy guarding the cases of phage, and worrying, "Maybe
this stuff would save everybody."

Now Stokes of St. Swithin's was a reticent man and hard,
but when they had the last bag upstairs, he leaned his head
against a door, cried, "My God, Arrowsmith, I'm so glad you've
got here," and broke from them, running. . . . One of the
Negro harbor-police, expressionless, speaking the English of the
Antilles with something of the accent of Piccadilly, said, "Sar,
have you any other command for I? If you permit, we boys
will now go home. Sar, on the table is the whisky Dr. Stokes
have told I to bring."

Martin stared. It was Sondelius who said, "Thank you very
much, boys. Here's a quid between you. Now get some sleep."

They saluted and were not.

Sondelius made the novices as merry as he could for half an
hour.

Martin and Leora woke to a broiling, flaring, green and crim-
son morning, yet ghastly still; awoke and realized that about
them was a strange land, as yet unseen, and before them the
work that in distant New York had seemed dramatic and joyful
and that stank now of the charnel house.

378

Ill

A sort of breakfast was brought to them by a Negress who,
before she would enter, peeped fearfully at them from the door.

Sondelius rumbled in from his room, in an impassioned silk
dressing-gown. If ever, spectacled and stooped, he had looked
old, now he was young and boisterous.

"Hey, ya, Slim, I think we get some work here! Let me at
those rats! This Inchcape — to try to master them with strychnin!
A noble melon! Leora, when you divorce Martin, you marry
me, heh? Give me the salt. Yey, I sleep fine!"

The night before, Martin had scarce looked at their room.
Now he was diverted by what he considered its foreignness: the
lofty walls of wood painted a watery blue, the wide furniture-
less spaces the bougainvillaea at the window, and in the COUrt>
yard the merciless heat and rattling metallic leaves of palmettoe&

Beyond the courtyard walls were the upper stories of a bal-
conied Chinese shop and the violent-colored skylight of The Blue
Bazaar.

He felt that there should be a clamor from this exotic world,
but there was only a rebuking stillness, and even Sondelius
became dumb, though he had his moment. He waddled back to
his room, dressed himself in surah silk last worn on the East
Coast of Africa, and returned bringing a sun-helmet which
secretly he had bought for Martin.

In linen jacket and mushroom helmet, Martin belonged more
to the tropics than to his own harsh Northern meadows. But
his pleasure in looking foreign was interrupted by the entrance
of the Surgeon General, Dr. R. E. Inchcape Jones, lean but
apple-cheeked, worried and hasty.

"Of course you chaps are welcome, but really, with all we have
to do I'm afraid we can't give you the attention you doubdess
expect," he said indignantly.

Martin sought for adequate answer. It was Sondelius who
spoke of a non-existent cousin who was a Harley Street special-
ist, and who explained that all they wanted was a laboratory
for Martin and, for himself, a chance to slaughter rats. How
many times, in how many lands, had Gustaf Sondelius flattered
pro-consuls and persuaded the heathen to let themselves be
saved 1

379

Under his hands the Surgeon General became practically
human; he looked as though he really thought Leora was pretty;
he promised that he might perhaps let Sondelius tamper with
his rats. He would return that afternoon and conduct them to
the house prepared for them, Penrith Lodge, on the safe secluded
hills behind Blackwater. And (he bowed gallantly) he thought
that Mrs. Arrowsmith would find the Lodge a topping bunga-
low, with three rather decent servants. The butler, though a
colored chap, was an old mess-sergeant.

Inchcape Jones had scarce gone when at the door there was
a pounding and it opened on Martin's classmate at Winnemac,
Dr. the Rev. Ira Hinkley.

Martin had forgotten Ira, that bulky Christian who had tried
to save him during otherwise dulcet hours of dissection. He
recalled him confusedly. The man came in, vast and lumbering.
His eyes were staring and altogether mad, and his voice was
parched :

"Hello, Mart. Yump, it's old Ira. I'm in charge of all the
chapels of the Sanctification Brotherhood here. Oh, Mart, if you
only knew the wickedness of the natives, and the way they lie
and sing indecent songs and commit all manner of vileness! And
the Church of England lets them wallow in their sins! Only us
to save them. I heard you were coming. I have been laboring,
Mart. I've nursed the poor plague-stricken devils, and I've told
them how hellfire is roaring about them. Oh, Mart, if you knew
how my heart bleeds to see these ignorant fellows going un-
repentant to eternal torture! After all these years I know you
can't still be a scoffer. I come to you with open hands, begging
you not merely to comfort the sufferers but to snatch their souls
from the burning lakes of sulfur to which, in His everlasting
mercy, the Lord of Hosts hath condemned those that blaspheme
against His gospel, freely given — "

Again it was Sondelius who got Ira Hinkley out, not too
discontented, while Martin could only splutter, "Now how do
you suppose that maniac ever got here? This is going to be
awful!"

Before Inchcape Jones returned, the Commission ventured out
for their first sight of the town. ... A Scientific Commission,
yet all the while they were only boisterous Gustaf and doubtful
Martin and casual Leora.

38o

The citizens had been told that in bubonic plague, unlike
pneumonic, there is no danger from direct contact with people
developing the disease, so long as vermin were kept away, but
they did not believe it. They were afraid of one another, and
the more afraid of strangers. The Commission found a street
dying with fear. House-shutters were closed, hot slatted patches
in the sun; and the only traffic was an empty trolley-car with a
frightened motorman who peered down at them and sped up
lest they come aboard. Grocery shops and drugstores were open,
but from their shady depths the shopkeepers looked out timidly,
and when the Commission neared a fish-stall, the one customer
fled, edging past them.

Once a woman, never explained, a woman with wild un-
gathered hair, ran by them shrieking, "My little boy — "

They came to the market, a hundred stalls under a long cor-
rugated-iron roof, with stone pillars bearing the fatuous names
of the commissioners who had built it — by voting bonds for the
building. It should have been buzzing with jovial buyers and
sellers, but in all the gaudy booths there were only one Negress
with a row of twig besoms, one Hindu in gray rags squatting
before his wealth of a dozen vegetables. The rest was emptiness,
and a litter of rotted potatoes and scudding papers.

Down a grim street of coal yards, they found a public square,
and here was the stillness not of sleep but of ancient death.

The square was rimmed with the gloom of mango trees,
which shut out the faint-hearted breeze and cooped in the heat —
stale lifeless heat, in whose misery the leering silence was the
more dismaying. Through a break in the evil mangoes they
beheld a plaster house hung with black crape.

"It's too hot to walk. Perhaps we'd better go back to the
hotel," said Leora.

IV

In the afternoon Inchcape Jones appeared with a Ford, whose
familiarity made it the more grotesque in this creepy world, and
took them to Penrith Lodge, on the cool hills behind Black-
water.

They traversed a packed native section of bamboo hovels and
shops that were but unpainted, black-weathered huts, without
doors, without windows, from whose recesses dark faces looked

38i

at them resentfully. They passed, at their colored driver's most
jerky speed, a new brick structure in front of which stately
Negro policemen with white gloves, white sun-helmets, and
scarlet coats cut by white belts, marched with rifles at the carry.

Inchcape Jones sighed, "Schoolhouse. Turned it into pest-
house. Hundred cases in there. Die every hour. Have to guard
it — patients get delirious and try to escape."

After them trailed an odor of rotting.

Martin did not feel superior to humanity.

With broad porches and low roof, among bright flamboyants
and the cheerful sago palms, the bungalow of Penrith Lodge lay
high on a crest, looking across the ugly flat of the town to the
wash of sea. At its windows the reed jalousies whispered and
clattered, and the high bare rooms were enlivened by figured
Carib scarfs. ... It had belonged to the port-doctor, dead these
three days.

Inchcape Jones assured the doubtful Leora.that she would no-
where else be so safe; the house was rat-proofed, and the doctor
had caught the plague at the pier, had died without ever coming
back to this well-beloved bungalow in which he, the professional
bachelor, had given the most clamorous parties in St. Hubert.

Martin had with him sufficient equipment for a small labora-
tory, and he established it in a bedroom with gas and running
water. Next to it was his and Leora's bedroom, then an apart-
ment which Sondelius immediately made homelike by dropping
his clothes and his pipe ashes all over it.

There were two colored maids and an ex-soldier butler, who
received them and unpacked their bags as though the plague
did not exist.

Martin was perplexed by their first caller. He was a singu-
larly handsome young Negro, quick-moving, intelligent of eye.
Like most white Americans, Martin had talked a great deal
about the inferiority of Negroes and had learned nothing what-
ever about them. He looked questioning as the young man
observed:

"My name is Oliver Marchand."

"Yes?"

382

"Dr. Marchand — I have my M.D. from Howard."

"Oh."

"May I venture to welcome you, Doctor? And may I ask
before I hurry off — I have three cases from official families iso-
lated at the bottom of the hill — oh, yes, in this crisis they permit
a Negro doctor to practice even among the whites! But — Dr.
Stokes insists that D'Herelle and you are right in calling bac-
teriophage an organism. But what about Bordet's contention
that it's an enzyme?"

Then for half an hour did Dr. Arrowsmith and Dr. Mar-
chand, forgetting the plague, forgetting the more cruel plague
of race-fear, draw diagrams.

Marchand sighed, "I must go, Doctor. May I help you in any
way I can? It is a great privilege to know you."

He saluted quietly and was gone, a beautiful young animal.

"I never thought a Negro doctor — I wish people wouldn't
keep showing me how much I don't know!" said Martin.

VI

While Martin prepared his laboratory, Sondelius was joyfully
at work, finding out what was wrong with Inchcape Jones's
administration, which proved to be almost anything that could
be wrong.

A plague epidemic today, in a civilized land, is no longer an
affair of people dying in the streets and of drivers shouting
"Bring out your dead." The fight against it is conducted like
modern warfare, with telephones instead of foaming chargers.
The ancient horror bears a face of efficiency. There are offices,
card indices, bacteriological examinations of patients and of rats.
There is, or should be, a lone director with superlegal powers.
There are large funds, education of the public by placard and
newspaper, brigades of rat-killers, a corps of disinfectors, isola-
tion of patients lest vermin carry the germs from them to others.

In most of these particulars Inchcape Jones had failed. To
have the existence of the plague admitted in the first place, he
had had to fight the merchants controlling the House of Assem-
bly, who had howled that a quarantine would ruin them, and
who now refused to give him complete power and tried to
manage the epidemic with a Board of Health, which was some-

383

what worse than navigating a ship during a typhoon by means
of a committee.

Inchcape Jones was courageous enough, but he could not cajole
people. The newspapers called him a tyrant, would not help
win over the public to take precautions against rats and ground
squirrels. He had tried to fumigate a few warehouses with sulfur
dioxid, but the owners complained that the fumes stained fabrics
and paint; and the Board of Health bade him wait — wait a little
while — wait and see. He had tried to have the rats examined,
to discover what were the centers of infection, but his only
bacteriologists were the overworked Stokes and Oliver Mar-
chand; and Inchcape Jones had often explained, at nice dinner-
parties, that he did not trust the intelligence of Negroes.

He was nearly insane; he worked twenty hours a day; he
assured himself that he was not afraid; he reminded himself
that he had an honestly won D.S.O.; he longed to have someone
besides a board of Red Leg merchants give him orders; and
always in the blur of his sleepless brain he saw the hills of Sur-
rey, his sisters in the rose-walk, and the basket-chairs and tea-
table beside his father's tennis-lawn.

Then Sondelius, that crafty and often lying lobbyist, that un-
moral soldier of the Lord, burst in and became dictator.

He terrified the Board of Health. He quoted his own expe-
riences in Mongolia and India. He assured them that if they
did not cease being politicians, the plague might cling in St.
Hubert forever, so that they would no more have the amiable
dollars of the tourists and the pleasures of smuggling.

He threatened and flattered, and told a story which they had
never heard, even at the Ice House; and he had Inchcape Jones
appointed dictator of St. Hubert.

Gustaf Sondelius stood extremely close behind the dictator.

He immediately started rat-killing. On a warrant signed by
Inchcape Jones, he arrested the owner of a warehouse who had
declared that he was not going to have his piles of cocoa ruined.
He marched his policemen, stout black fellows trained in the
Great War, to the warehouse, set them on guard, and pumped
in hydrocyanic acid gas.

The crowd gathered beyond the police line, wondering, doubt-
ing. They could not believe that anything was happening, for
the cracks in the warehouse walls had been adequately stuffed

384

and there was no scent of gas. But the roof was leaky. The gas
crept up through it, colorless, diabolic, and suddenly a buzzard
circling above the roof tilted forward, fell slantwise? and lay
dead among che watchers.

A man picked it up, goggling.

"Dead, right enough," everybody muttered. They looked at
Sondelius, parading among his soldiers, with reverence.

His rat-crew searched each warehouse before pumping in the
gas, lest someone be left in the place, but in the third one a
tramp had been asleep, and when the doors were anxiously
opened after the fumigation, there were not only thousands of
dead rats but also a dead and very stiff tramp.

"Poor fella — bury him," said Sondelius.

There was no inquest.

Over a rum swizzle at the Ice House, Sondelius reflected, "I
wonder how many men I murder, Martin? When I was dis-
infecting ships at Antofagasta, always afterward we find two
or three stowaways. They hide too good. Poor fellas."

Sondelius arbitrarily dragged bookkeepers and porters from
their work, to pursue the rats with poison, traps, and gas, or
to starve them by concreting and screening stables and ware-
houses. He made a violent red and green rat map of the town.
He broke every law of property by raiding shops for supplies.
He alternately bullied and caressed the leaders of the House of
Assembly. He called on Kellett, told stories to his children, and
almost wept as he explained what a good Lutheran he was—
and consistently (but not at Kellett's) he drank too much.

The Ice House, that dimmest and most peaceful among sa-
loons, with its cool marble tables, its gilt-touched white walls,
had not been closed, though only the oldest topers and the
youngest bravos, fresh out from Home and agonizingly lonely
for Peckham or Walthamstow, for Peel Park or the Cirencester
High Street, were desperate enough to go there, and of the
attendants there remained only one big Jamaica barman. By
chance he was among them all the most divine mixer of the
planter's punch, the New Orleans fizz, and the rum swizzle.
His masterpieces Sondelius acclaimed, he alone placid among
the scary patrons who came in now not to dream but to gulp
and flee. After a day of slaughtering rats and disinfecting houses

385

he sat with Martin, with Martin and Leora, or with whomever
he could persuade to linger.

To Gustaf Sondelius, dukes and cobblers were alike remark-
able, and Martin was sometimes jealous when he saw Sondelius
turning to a cocoa-broker's clerk with the same smile he gave
to Martin. For hours Sondelius talked, of Shanghai and episte-
mology and the painting of Nevinson; for hours he sang scur-
rilous lyrics of the Quarter, and boomed, "Yey, how I kill the
rats at Kellett's wharf today! I don't t'ink one little swizzle
would break down too many glomeruli in an honest man's
kidneys."

He was cheerful, but never with the reproving and infuriating
cheerfulness of an Ira Hinkley. He mocked himself, Martin,
Leora, and their work. At home dinner he never cared what he
ate (though he did care what he drank), which at Penrith Lodge
was desirable, in view of Leora's efforts to combine the views of
Wheatsylvania with the standards of West Indian servants and
the absence of daily deliveries. He shouted and sang — and took
precautions for working among rats and the agile fleas: the high
boots, the strapped wrists, and the rubber neck-band which he
had invented and which is known in every tropical supply shop
today as the Sondelius Anti-vermin Neck Protector.

It happened that he was, without Martin or Gottlieb ever un-
derstanding it, the most brilliant as well as the least pompous
and therefore least appreciated warrior against epidemics that
the world has known.

Thus with Sondelius, though for Martin there were as yet
but embarrassment and futility and the fear of fear.

386

CHAPTER XXXIV

TO persuade the shopkeeping lords of St. Hubert to endure
a test in which half of them might die, so that all plague
might — perhaps — be ended forever, was impossible. Martin
argued with Inchcape Jones, with Sondelius, but he had no
favor, and he began to meditate a political campaign as he would
have meditated an experiment.

He had seen the suffering of the plague and he had (though
he still resisted) been tempted to forget experimentation, to give
up the possible saving of millions for the immediate saving of
thousands. Inchcape Jones, a little rested now under Sondelius's
padded bullying and able to slip into a sane routine, drove
Martin to the village of Carib, which, because of its pest of
infected ground squirrels, was proportionately worse smitten
than Blackwater.

They sped out of the capital by white shell roads agonizing
to the sun-poisoned eyes; they left the dusty shanties of suburban
Yamtown for a land cool with bamboo groves and palmettoes,
thick with sugar-cane. From a hilltop they swung down a curv-
ing road to a beach where the high surf boomed in limestone
caves. It seemed impossible that this joyous shore could be
threatened by plague, the slimy creature of dark alleys.

The motor cut through a singing trade wind which told of
clean sails and disdainful men. They darted on where the foam
feathers below Point Carib and where, round that lone royal
palm on the headland, the bright wind hums. They slipped into
a hot valley, and came to the village of Carib and to creeping
horror.

The plague had been dismaying in Blackwater; in Carib it
was the end of all things. The rat-fleas had found fat homes in
the ground squirrels which burrowed in every garden about

3*7

the village. In Blackwater there had from the first been isolation
of the sick, but in Carib death was in every house, and the vil-
lage was surrounded by soldier police, with bayonets, who let
no one come or go save the doctors.

Martin was guided down the stinking street of cottages palm-
thatched and walled with cow-dung plaster on bamboo laths,
cottages shared by the roosters and the goats. He heard men
shrieking in delirium; a dozen times he saw that face of terror
— sunken bloody eyes, drawn face, open mouth — which marks
the Black Death; and once he beheld an exquisite girl child in
coma on the edge of death, her tongue black and round her the
scent of the tomb.

They fled away, to Point Carib and the trade wind, and when
Inchcape Jones demanded, "After that sort of thing, can you
really talk of experimenting?" then Martin shook his head, while
he tried to recall the vision of Gottlieb and all their little plans:
"half to get the phage, half to be sternly deprived."

It came to him that Gottlieb, in his secluded innocence, had
not realized what it meant to gain leave to experiment amid the
hysteria of an epidemic.

He went to the Ice House; he had a drink with a frightened
clerk from Derbyshire; he regained the picture of Gottlieb's
sunken, demanding eyes; and he swore that he would not yield
fo a compassion which in the end would make all compassion
; 'utile.

Since Inchcape Jones could not understand the need of experi-
mentation, he would call on the Governor, Colonel Sir Robert
Fairlamb.

ii

Though Government House was officially the chief residence
of St. Hubert, it Was but a thatched bungalow a little larger
than Martin's own Penrith Lodge. When he saw it, Martin felt
more easy, and he ambled up to the broad steps, at nine of the
evening, as though he were dropping in to call on a neighbor in
Wheatsylvania.

He was stopped by a Jamaican man-servant of appalling
courtesy.

He snorted that he was Dr. Arrowsmith, head of the McGurk

388

Commission, and he was sorry but he must see Sir Robert at
once.

The servant was suggesting, in his blandest and most annoy-
ing manner, that really Dr. Uh would do better to see the Sur-
geon General, when a broad red face and a broad red voice
projected themselves over the veranda railing, with a rumble of,
"Send him up, Jackson, and don't be a fool!"

Sir Robert and Lady Fairlamb were finishing dinner on the
veranda, at a small round table littered with coffee and liqueurs
and starred with candles. She was a slight, nervous insignifi-
cance; he was rather puffy, very flushed, undoubtedly coura-
geous, and altogether dismayed; and at a time when no laun-
dress dared go anywhere, his evening shirt was luminous.

Martin was in his now beloved linen suit, with a crumply soft
shirt which Leora had been meanin' to wash.

Martin explained what he wanted to do — what he must do, if
the world was ever to get over the absurdity of having plague.

Sir Robert listened so agreeably that Martin thought he un-
derstood, but at the end he bellowed:

"Young man, if I were commanding a division at the front,
with a dud show, an awful show, going on, and a War Office
clerk asked me to risk the whole thing to try out some precious
little invention of his own, can you imagine what I'd answer?
There isn't much I can do now — these doctor Johnnies have
taken everything out of my hands — but as far as possible I shall
certainly prevent you Yankee vivisectionists from coming in and
using us as a lot of sanguinary — sorry, Evelyn — sanguinary
corpses. Good night, sir!"

in

Thanks to Sondelius's crafty bullying, Martin was able to
present his plan to a Special Board composed of the Governor,
the temporarily suspended Board of Health, Inchcape Jones,
several hearty members of the House of Assembly, and Son-
delius himself, attending in the unofficial capacity which all over
the world he had found useful for masking a cheerful tyranny.
Sondelius even brought in the Negro doctor, Oliver Marchand,
not on the ground that he was the most intelligent person on

389

the island (which happened to be Sondelius's reason) but be-
cause he "represented the plantation hands."

Sondelius himself was as much opposed to Martin's unemo-
tional experiments as was Fairlamb; he believed that all experi-
ments should be, by devices not entirely clear to him, carried on
in the laboratory without disturbing the conduct of agreeable
epidemics, but he could never resist a drama like the innocent
meeting of the Special Board.

The meeting was set for a week ahead . . . with scores dying
every day. While he waited for it Martin manufactured more
phage and helped Sondelius murder rats, and Leora listened to
the midnight debates of the two men and tried to make them
acknowledge that it had been wise to let her come. Inchcape
Jones offered to Martin the position of Government bacteriolo-
gist, but he refused lest he be sidetracked.

The Special Board met in Parliament House, all of them
trying to look not like their simple and domestic selves but like
judges. With them appeared such doctors of the island as could
find the time.

While Leora listened from the back of the room, Martin
addressed them, not unaware of the spectacle of little Mart
Arrowsmith of Elk Mills taken seriously by the rulers of a tropic
isle headed by a Sir Somebody. Beside him stood Max Gottlieb,
and in Gottlieb's power he reverently sought to explain that
mankind has ever given up eventual greatness because some
crisis, some war or election or loyalty to a Messiah which at the
moment seemed weighty, has choked the patient search for
truth. He sought to explain that he could — perhaps — save half
of a given district, but that to test for all time the value of
phage, the other half must be left without it . . . though, he
craftily told them, in any case the luckless half would receive
as much care as at present.

Most of the Board had heard that he possessed a magic cure
for the plague which, for unknown and probably discreditable
reasons, he was withholding, and they were not going to have
it withheld. There was a great deal of discussion rather uncon-
nected with what he had said, and out of it came only the fact
that everybody except Stokes and Oliver Marchand was against
him; Kellett was angry with this American, Sir Robert Fairlamb

390

was beefily disapproving, and Sondelius admitted that though
Martin was quite a decent young man, he was a fanatic.

Into their argument plunged a fury in the person of Ira
Hinkley, missionary of the Sanctification Brotherhood.

Martin had not seen him since the first morning in Black-
water. He gaped as he heard Ira pleading:

"Gentlemen, I know almost the whole bunch of you are
Church of England, but I beg you to listen to me, not as a
minister but as a qualified doctor of medicine. Oh, the wrath
of God is upon you — But I mean: I was a classmate of Arrow-
smith in the States. I'm onto him! He was such a failure that
he was suspended from medical school. A scientist! And his
boss, this fellow Gottlieb, he was fired from the University of
Winnemac for incompetence! I know 'em! Liars and fools!
Scorners of righteousness! Has anybody but Arrowsmith him-
self told you he's a qualified scientist?"

The face of Sondelius changed from curiosity to stolid Scan-
dinavian wrath. He arose and shouted:

"Sir Robert, this man is crazy! Dr. Gottlieb is one of the seven
distinguished living scientists, and Dr. Arrowsmith is his repre-
sentative! I announce my agreement with him, complete. As
you must have seen from my work, I'm perfectly independent
of him and entirely at your service, but I know his standing
and I follow him, quite humbly."

The Special Board coaxed Ira Hinkley out, for the meanest
of reasons — in St. Hubert the whites do not greatly esteem the
holy ecstasies of Negroes in the Sanctification Brotherhood
chapels — but they voted only to "give the matter their consid-
eration," while still men died by the score each day, and in
Manchuria as in St. Hubert they prayed for rest from the ancient
clawing pain.

Outside, as the Special Board trudged away, Sondelius blared
at Martin and the indignant Leora, "Yey, a fine fight!"

Martin answered, "Gustaf, you've joined me now. The first
darn' thing you do, you come have a shot of phage."

"No. Slim, I said I will not have your phage till you give it
to everybody. I mean it, no matter how much I make fools of
your Board."

As they stood before Parliament House, a small motor pos-
sessing everything but comfort and power staggered up to them,

391

and from it vaulted a man lean as Gottlieb and English as Inch-
cape Jones.

"You Dr. Arrowsmith? My name is Twyford, Cecil Twyford
of St. Swithin's Parish. Tried to get here for the Special Board
meeting, but my beastly foreman had to take the afternoon of!
and die of plague. Stokes has told me your plans. Quite right.
All nonsense to go on having plague. Board refused? Sorry.
Perhaps we can do something in St. Swithin's. Goo' day."

All evening Martin and Sondelius were full of language.
Martin went to bed longing for the regularity of working all
night and foraging for cigarettes at dawn. He could not sleep,
because an imaginary Ira Hinkley was always bursting in on
him.

Four days later he heard that Ira was dead.

Till he had sunk in coma, Ira had nursed and blessed his
people, the humble colored congregation in the hot tin chapel
which he had now turned into a pest-house. He staggered from
cot to cor, under the gospel texts he had lettered on the white-
washed wall, then he cried once, loudly, and dropped by the
pine pulpit where he had joyed to preach.

IV

One chance Martin did have. In Carib, where every third
man was down with plague and one doctor to attend them all,
he now gave phage to the entire village; a long strain of injec-
tions, not improved by the knowledge that one jaunty flea from
any patient might bring him the plague.

The tedium of dread was forgotten when he began to find
and make precise notes of a slackening of the epidemic, which
was occurring nowhere except here at Carib.

He came home raving to Leora, "I'll show 'em! Now they'll
let me try test conditions, and then when the epidemic's over
we'll hustle home. It'll be lovely to be cold again! Wonder if
Holabird and Sholtheis are any more friendly now? Be pretty
good to see the little ole flat, eh?"

"Yes, won't it!" said Leora. "I wish I'd thought to have the
kitchen painted while we're away. ... I think I'll put that blue
chair in the bedroom."

Though there was a decrease in the plague at Carib, Sondelius

392

was worried, because it was the worst center for infected ground
squirrels on the island. He made decisions quickly. One evening
'he explained certain things to Inchcape Jones and Martin, rode
down their doubts, and snorted:

"Only way to disinfect that place is to burn it — burn th' whole
thing. Have it done by morning, before anybody can stop us."

With Martin as his lieutenant he marshaled his troop of rat-
catchers— ruffians all of them, with high boots, tied jacket sleeves,
and ebon visages of piracy. They stole food from shops, tents
and blankets and camp-stoves from the Government military
warehouse, and jammed their booty into motor trucks. The line
of trucks roared down to Carib, the rat-catchers sitting atop,
singing pious hymns.

They charged on the village, drove out the healthy, carried
the sick on litters, settled them all in tents in a pasture up the
valley, and after midnight they burned the town.

The troops ran among the huts, setting them alight with fan-
tastic torches. The palm thatch sent up thick smoke, dead slug-
gish white with currents of ghastly black through which broke
sudden flames. Against the glare the palmettoes were silhouetted.
The solid-seeming huts were instantly changed into thin bamboo
frameworks, thin lines of black slats, with the thatch falling in
sparks. The flame lighted the whole valley; roused the terrified
squawking birds, and turned the surf at Point Carib to bloody
foam.

With such of the natives as had strength enough and sense
enough, Sondelius's troops made a ring about the burning vil-
lage, shouting insanely as they clubbed the fleeing rats and
ground squirrels. In the flare of devastation Sondelius was a
fiend, smashing the bewildered rats with a club, shooting at
them as they fled, and singing to himself all the while the ob-
scene chantey of Bill the Sailor. But at dawn he was nursing
the sick in the bright new canvas village, showing mammies
how to use their camp-stoves, and in a benevolent way discussing
methods of poisoning ground squirrels in their burrows.

Sondelius returned to Blackwater, but Martin remained in the
tent village for two days, giving them the phage, making notes,
directing the amateur nurses. He returned to Blackwater one
mid-afternoon and sought the office of the Surgeon General, or

393

what had been the office of the Surgeon General till Sondelius
had come and taken it away from him.

Sondelius was there, at Inchcape Jones's desk, but for once
he was not busy. He was sunk in his chair, his eyes bloodshot.

"Yey! We had a fine time with the rats at Carib, eh? How
is my new tent willage?" he chuckled, but his voice was weak,
and as he rose he staggered.

"What is it? What is it?"

"I t'ink— It's got me. Some flea got me. Yes," in a shaky but
extremely interested manner, "I was yoost thinking I will go and
quarantine myself. I have fever all right, and adenitis. My
strength — Huh! I am almost sixty, but the way I can lift weights
that no sailor can touch — And I could fight five rounds! Oh,
my God, Martin, I am so weak! Not scared! No!"

But for Martin's arms he would have collapsed.

He refused to return to Penrith Lodge and Leora's nursing.
"I who have isolated so many — it is my turn," he said.

Martin and Inchcape Jones found for Sondelius a meager clean
cottage — the family had died there, all of them, but it had been
fumigated. They procured a nurse and Martin himself attended
the sick man, trying to remember that once he had been a doc-
tor, who understood ice-bags and consolation. One thing was
not to be had — mosquito netting — and only of this did Sondelius
complain.

Martin bent over him, agonized to see how burning was his
skin, how swollen his face and his tongue, how weak his voice
as he babbled:

"Gottlieb is right about these jests of God. Yey! His best one
is the tropics. God planned them so beautiful, flowers and sea
and mountains. He made the fruit to grow so well that man
need not work — and then He laughed, and stuck in volcanoes
and snakes and damp heat and early senility and the plague and
malaria. But the nastiest trick He ever played on man was in-
venting the flea."

His bloated lips widened, from his hot throat oozed a feeble
croaking, and Martin realized that he was trying to laugh.

He became delirious, but between spasms he muttered, with
infinite pain, tears in his eyes at his own weakness:

"I want you to see how an agnostic can die!

"I am not afraid, but yoost once more I would like to see

394

Stockholm, and Fifth Avenue on the day the first snow falls,
and Holy Week at Sevilla. And one good last drunk! I am very
peaceful, Slim. It hurts some, but life was a good game. And—
I am a pious agnostic. Oh, Martin, give my people the phage!
Save all of them — God, I did not think they could hurt me so!"
His heart had failed. He was still on his low cot.

Martin had an unhappy pride that, with all his love for Gustaf
Sondelius, he could still keep his head, still resist Inchcape
Jones's demand that he give the phage to everyone, still do what
he had been sent to do.

"I'm not a sentimentalist; I'm a scientist!" he boasted.

They snarled at him in the streets now; small boys called him
names and threw stones. They had heard that he was willfully
withholding their salvation. The citizens came in committees to
beg him to heal their children, and he was so shaken that he
had ever to keep before him the vision of Gottlieb.

The panic was increasing. They who had at first kept cool
could not endure the strain of wakening at night to see upon
their windows the glow of the pile of logs on Admiral Knob,
the emergency crematory where Gustaf Sondelius and his curly
gray mop had been shoveled into the fire along with a crippled
Negro boy and a Hindu beggar.

Sir Robert Fairlamb was a blundering hero, exasperating the
sick while he tried to nurse them; Stokes remained the Rock of
Ages— he had only three hours' sleep a night, but he never failed
to take his accustomed fifteen minutes of exercise when he
awoke; and Leora was easy in Penrith Lodge, helping Martin
prepare phage.

It was the Surgeon General who went to pieces.

Robbed of his dependence on the despised Sondelius, sunk
again in a mad planlessness, Inchcape Jones shrieked when he
thought he was speaking low, and the cigarette which was ever
in his thin hand shook so that the smoke quivered up in trem-
bling spirals.

Making his tour, he came at night on a sloop by which a
dozen Red Legs were escaping to Barbados, and suddenly he
was among them, bribing them to take him along.

395

As the sloop stood out from Blackwater Harbor he stretched
his arms toward his sisters and the peace of the Surrey hills, but
as the few frightened lights of the town were lost, he realized
that he was a coward and came up out of his madness, with
his lean head high.

He demanded that they turn the sloop and take him back.
They refused, howling at him, and locked him in the cabin.
They were becalmed; it was two days before they reached Bar-
bados, and by then the world would know that he had deserted.

Altogether expressionless, Inchcape Jones tramped from the
sloop to a waterfront hotel in Barbados, and stood for a long
time in a slatternly room smelling of slop-pails. He would never
see his sisters and the cool hills. With the revolver which he had
carried to drive terrified patients back into the isolation wards,
with the revolver which he had carried at Arras, he killed him-
self.

vi

Thus Martin came to his experiment. Stokes was appointed
Surgeon General, vice Inchcape Jones, and he made an illegal
assignment of Martin to St. Swithin's Parish, as medical officer
with complete power. This, and the concurrence of Cecil Twy-
ford, made his experiment possible.

He was invited to stay at Twyford's. His only trouble was
the guarding of Leora. He did not know what he would en-
counter in St. Swithin's, while Penrith Lodge was as safe as any
place on the island. When Leora insisted that, during his experi-
ment, the cold thing which had stilled the laughter of Sondelius
might come to him and he might need her, he tried to satisfy
her by promising that if there was a place for her in St. Swithin's,
he would send for her.

Naturally, he was lying.

"Hard enough to see Gustaf go. By thunder she's not going
to run risks!" he vowed.

He left her, protected by the maids and the soldier butler, with
Dr. Oliver Marchand to look in when he could.

396

VII

In St. Swithin's Parish the cocoa and bamboo groves and sharp
hills of southern St. Hubert gave way to unbroken caneflelds.
Here Cecil Twyford, that lean abrupt man, ruled every acre
and interpreted every law.

His place, Frangipani Court, was a refuge from the hot hum-
ming plain. The house was old and low, of thick stone and
plaster walls; the paneled rooms were lined with the china, the
portraits, and the swords of Twyfords for three hundred years;
and between the wings was a walled garden dazzling with
hibiscus.

Twyford led Martin through the low cool hall and introduced
him to five great sons and to his mother, who, since his wife's
death, ten years ago, had been mistress of the house.

"Have tea?" said Twyford. "Our American guest will be
down in a moment."

He would not have thought of saying it, but he had sworn
that since for generations Twyfords had drunk tea here at a
seemly hour, no panic should prevent their going on drinking
it at that hour.

When Martin came into the garden, when he saw the old
silver on the wicker table and heard the quiet voices, the plague
seemed conquered, and he realized that, four thousand miles
southwest of the Lizard, he was in England.

They were seated, pleasant but not too comfortable, when the
American guest came down and from the door stared at Martin
as strangely as he stared in turn.

He beheld a woman who must be his sister. She was perhaps
thirty to his thirty-seven, but in her slenderness, her paleness,
her black brows and dusky hair, she was his twin; she was his
self enchanted.

He could hear his voice croaking, "But you're my sister!" and
she opened her lips, yet neither of them spoke as they bowed
at introduction. When she sat down, Martin had never been so
conscious of a woman's presence.

He learned, before evening, that she was Joyce Lanyon, widow
of Roger Lanyon of New York. She had come to St. Hubert
to see her plantations and had been trapped by the quarantine.
He had tentatively heard of her dead husband as a young man

397

of wealth and family; he seemed to remember having seen in
Vanity Fair a picture of the Lanyons at Palm Beach.

She talked only of the weather, the flowers, but there was a
rising gaiety in her which stirred even the dour Cecil Twyford.
In the midst of her debonair insults to the hugest of the huge
sons, Martin turned on her:

"You are my sister!"

"Obviously. Well, since you're a scientist — Are you a good
scientist?"

"Pretty good."

"I've met your Mrs. McGurk. And Dr. Rippleton Holabird.
Met 'em in Hessian Hook. You know it, don't you?"

"No, I— Oh, I've heard of it."

"You know. It's that renovated old part of Brooklyn where
writers and economists and all those people, some of them al-
most as good as the very best, consort with people who are
almost as smart as the very smartest. You know. Where they
dress for dinner but all of them have heard about James Joyce.
Dr. Holabird is frightfully charming, don't you think?"

"Why—"

"Tell me. I really mean it. Cecil has been explaining what
you plan to do experimentally. Could I help you — nursing or
cooking or something — or would I merely be in the way?"

"I don't know yet. If I can use you, I'll be unscrupulous
enough ! "

"Oh, don't be earnest like Cecil here, and Dr. Stokes! They
have no sense of play. Do you like that man Stokes? Cecil adores
him, and I suppose he's simply infested with virtues, but I find
him so dry and thin and unappetizing. Don't, you think he
might be a little gayer?"

Martin gave up all chance of knowing her as he hurled:

"Look here! You said you found Holabird 'charming.' It
makes me tired to have you fall for his scientific tripe and not
appreciate Stokes. Stokes is hard — thank God! — and probably
he's rude. Why not? He's fighting a world that bellows for
fake charm. No scientist can go through his grind and not come
out more or less rude. And I tell you Stokes was born a re-
searcher. I wish we had him at McGurk. Rude? Wish you could
hear him being rude to me!"

Twyford looked doubtful, his mother looked delicately

398

shocked, and the five sons beefily looked nothing at all, while
Martin raged on, trying to convey his vision of the barbarian,
the ascetic, the contemptuous acolyte of science. But Joyce Lan-
yon's lovely eyes were kind, and when she spoke she had lost
something of her too-cosmopolitan manner of a diner-out:

"Yes. I suppose it's the difference between me, playing at
being a planter, and Cecil."

After dinner he walked with her in the garden and sought
to defend himself against he was not quite sure what, till she
hinted:

"My dear man, you're so apologetic about never being apolo-
getic! If you really must be my twin brother, do me the honor
of telling me to go to the devil whenever you want to. I don't
mind. Now about your Gottlieb, who seems to be so much of
an obsession with you — "

"Obsession! Rats! He—"

They parted an hour after.

Least of all things Martin desired such another peeping,
puerile, irritable restlessness as he had shared with Orchid Pick-
erbaugh, but as he went to bed in a room with old prints and
a four-poster, it was disturbing to know that somewhere near
him was Joyce Lanyon.

He sat up, aghast with truth. Was he going to fall in love
with this desirable and quite useless young woman? (How
lovely her shoulders, above black satin at dinner! She had a
genius of radiant flesh; it made that of most women, even the
fragile Leora, seem coarse and thick. There was a rosy glow
behind it, as from an inner light.)

Did he really want Leora here, with Joyce Lanyon in the
house? (Dear Leora, who was the source of life! Was she now,
off there in Penrith Lodge, missing him, lying awake for him?)

How could he, even in the crisis of an epidemic, invite the
formal Twyfords to invite Leora? (How honest was he? That
afternoon he had recognized the rigid though kindly code of the
Twyfords, but could he not set it aside by being frankly an.
Outlander?)

Suddenly he was out of bed, kneeling, praying to Leora.

399

CHAPTER XXXV

THE plague had only begun to invade St. Swithin's, but
it was unquestionably coming, and Martin, with his power
as official medical officer of the parish, was able to make
plans. He divided the population into two equal parts. One of
them, driven in by Twyford, was injected with plague phage,
the other half was left without.

He began to succeed. He saw far-off" India, with its annual
four hundred thousand deaths from plague, saved by his efforts.
He heard Max Gottlieb saying, "Martin, you haf done your
experiment. I am very glat!"

The pest attacked the unphaged half of the parish much more
heavily than those who had been treated. There did appear a
case or two among those who had the phage, but among the
others there were ten, then twenty, then thirty daily victims.
These unfortunate cases he treated, giving the phage to alternate
patients, in the somewhat barren almshouse of the parish, a
whitewashed cabin the meaner against its vaulting background
of banyans and breadfruit trees.

He could never understand Cecil Twyford. Though Twyford
had considered his hands as slaves, though he had, in his great
barony, given them only this barren almshouse, yet he risked
his life now in nursing them, and the lives of all his sons.

Despite Martin's discouragement, Mrs. Lanyon came down to
cook, and a remarkably good cook she was. She also made beds;
she showed more intelligence than the Twyford men about dis-
infecting herself; and as she bustled about the rusty kitchen, in
a gingham gown she had borrowed from a maid, she so dis-
turbed Martin that he forgot to be gruff.

400

II

In the evening, while they returned by Twyford's rattling little
motor to Frangipani Court, Mrs. Lanyon talked to Martin as one
who had shared his work, but when she had bathed and pow-
dered and dressed, he talked to her as one who was afraid of
her. Their bond was their resemblance as brother and sister.
They decided, almost irritably, that they looked utterly alike,
except that her hair was more patent-leather than his and she
lacked his impertinent, cocking eyebrow.

Often Martin returned to his patients at night, but once or
twice Mrs. Lanyon and he fled, as much from the family stolidity
of the Twyfords as from the thought of fever-scorched patients,
to the shore of a rocky lagoon which cut far in from the sea.

They sat on a cliff, full of the sound of the healing tide. His
brain was hectic with the memory of charts on the whitewashed
broad planks of the almshouse, the sun cracks in the wall, the
puffy terrified faces of black patients, how one of the Twyford
sons had knocked over an ampule of phage, and how itchingly
hot it had been in the ward. But to his intensity the lagoon
breeze was cooling, and cooling the rustling tide. He perceived
that Mrs. Lanyon's white frock was fluttering about her knees;
he realized that she too was strained and still. He turned som-
berly toward her, and she cried:

"I'm so frightened and so lonely! The Twyfords are heroic,
but they're stone. I'm so marooned!"

He kissed her, and she rested against his shoulder. The soft-
ness of her sleeve was agitating to his hand. But she broke away
with:

"No! You don't really care a hang about me. Just curious.
Perhaps that's a good thing for me — tonight."

He tried to assure her, to assure himself, that he did care with
peculiar violence, but languor was over him; between him and
her fragrance were the hospital cots, a great weariness, and the
still face of Leora. They were silent together, and when his hand
crept to hers they sat unimpassioned, comprehending, free to
talk of what they would.

He stood outside her door, when they had returned to the
house, and imagined her soft moving within.

"No," he raged. "Can't do it. Joyce — women like her — one of

401

the million things I've given up for work and for Lee. Well.
That's all there is to it then. But if I were here two weeks —
Fool! She'd be furious if you knocked! But — "

He was aware of the dagger of light under her door; the
more aware of it as he turned his back and tramped to his room.

in

The telephone service in St. Hubert was the clumsiest feature
of the island. There was no telephone at Penrith Lodge — the
port-doctor had cheerfully been wont to get his calls through a
neighbor. The central was now demoralized by the plague, and
when for two hours Martin had tried to have Leora summoned,
he gave up.

But he had triumphed. In three or four days he would drive
to Penrith Lodge. Twyford had blankly assented to his sugges-
tion that Leora be invited hither, and if she and Joyce Lanyon
should become such friends that Joyce would never again turn
to him in loneliness, he was willing, he was eager — he was al-
most eager.

IV

When Martin left her at the Lodge, in the leafy gloom high
on the Penrith Hills, Leora felt his absence. They had been so
little apart since he had first come on her, scrubbing a hospital
room in Zenith.

The afternoon was unending; each time she heard a creaking
she roused with the hope that it was his step, and realized that
he would not be coming, all the blank evening, the terrifying
night; would not be here anywhere, not his voice nor the touch
Df his hand.

Dinner was mournful. Often enough she had dined alone
when Martin was at the Institute, but then he had been return-
ing to her some time before dawn — probably — and she had re-
flectively munched a snack on the corner of the kitchen table,
looking at the funnies in the evening paper. Tonight she had
to live up to the butler, who served her as though she were a
dinner-party of twenty.

She sat on the porch, staring at the shadowy roofs of Black-

402

water below, sure that she felt a "miasm'- writhing up through
the hot darkness.

She knew the direction of St. Swithin's Parish — beyond that
delicate glimmer of lights from palm huts coiling up the hills.
She concentrated on it, wondering if by some magic she might
not have a signal from him, but she could get no feeling of his
looking toward her. She sat long and quiet. . . . She had noth-
ing to do.

Her night was sleepless. She tried to read in bed, by an electric
globe inside the misty little tent of the mosquito-netting, but
there was a tear in the netting and the mosquitoes crept through.
As she turned out the light and lay tense, unable to give herself
over to sleep, unable to sink into security, while to her blurred
eyes the half-seen folds of the mosquito netting seemed to slide
about her, she tried to remember whether these mosquitoes
might be carrying plague germs. She realized how much she
had depended on Martin for such bits of knowledge, as for all
philosophy. She recalled how annoyed he had been because she
could not remember whether the yellow fever mosquito was
Anopheles or Stegomyia — or was it Aedes? — and suddenly she
laughed in the night.

She was reminded that he had told her to give herself another
injection of phage.

"Hang it, I forgot. Well, I must be sure to do that tomorrow."

"Do that t'morrow — do that t'morrow," buzzed in her brain,
an irritating inescapable refrain, while she was suspended over
sleep, conscious of how much she wanted to creep into his arms.

Next morning (and she did not remember to give herself an-
other injection) the servants seemed twitchy, and her effort to
comfort them brought out the news that Oliver Marchand, the
doctor on whom they depended, was dead.

In the afternoon the butler heard that his sister had been
taken off to the isolation ward, and he went down to Blackwater
to make arrangements for his nieces. He did not return; no one
ever learned what had become of him.

Toward dusk, when Leora felt as though a skirmish line were
closing in on her, she fled into Martin's laboratory. It seemed
filled with his jerky brimming presence. She kept away from
the flasks of plague germs, but she picked up, because it was his,
a half-smoked cigarette and lighted it.

403

Now there was a slight crack in her lips; and that morning,
fumbling at dusting — here in the laboratory mean': as a fortress
against disease — a maid had knocked over a test-tube, which had
trickled. The cigarette seemed dry enough, but n it there were
enough plague germs to kill a regiment.

Two nights after, when she was so desperately lonely that she
thought of walking to Blackwater, finding a motor, and fleeing
to Martin, she woke with a fever, a headache, her limbs chilly.
When the maids discovered her in the morning, they fled from
the house. While lassitude flowed round her, she was left alone
in the isolated house, with no telephone.

All day, all night, as her throat crackled with thirst, she lay
longing for someone to help her. Once she crawled to the
kitchen for water. The floor of the bedroom was an endless
heaving sea, the hall a writhing dimness, and by the kitchen
door she dropped and lay for an hour, whimpering.

"Got to — got to — can't remember what it was," her voice kept
appealing to her cloudy brain.

Aching, fighting the ache, she struggled up, wrapped about
her a shabby cloak which one of the maids had abandoned in
flight, and in the darkness staggered out to find help. As she
came to the highway she stumbled, and lay under the hedge,
unmoving, like a hurt animal. On hands and knees she crawled
back into the Lodge, and between times, as her brain went dark,
she nearly forgot the pain in her longing for Martin.

She was bewildered; she was lonely; she dared not start on her
long journey without his hand to comfort her. She listened for
him — listened — tense with listening.

"You will come! I know you'll come and help me! I know.
You'll come! Martin! Sandy! Sandy!" she sobbed.

Then she slipped down into the kindly coma. There was no
more pain, and all the shadowy house was quiet but for her
hoarse and struggling breath.

Like Sondelius, Joyce Lanyon tried to persuade Martin to give
the phage to everybody.
"I'm getting to be good and stern, with all you people after

404

me. Regular Gottlieb. Nothing can make me do it, not if they
tried to lynch me," he boasted.

He had explained Leora to Joyce.

"I don't know whether you two will like each other. You're
so darn' different. You're awfully articulate, and you like these
'pretty people' that you're always talking about, but she doesn't
care a hang for 'em. She sits back — oh, she never misses any-
thing, but she never says much. Still, she's got the best instinct
for honesty that I've ever known. I hope you two'll get each
other. I was afraid to let her come here — didn't know what I'd
find — but now I'm going to husde to Penrith and bring her here
today."

He borrowed Twyford's car and drove to Blackwater, up to
Penrith, in excellent spirits. For all the plague, they could have
a lively time in the evenings. One of the Twyford sons was not
so solemn; he and Joyce, with Martin and Leora, could slip down
to the lagoon for picnic suppers; they would sing —

He came up to Penrith Lodge bawling, "Lee! Leora! Come
on! Here we are!"

The veranda, as he ran up on it, was leaf-scattered and dusty,
and the front door was banging. His voice echoed in a des-
perate silence. He was uneasy. He darted in, found no one in
the living-room, the kitchen, then hastened into their bedroom.

On the bed, across the folds of the torn mosquito netting,
was Leora's body, very frail, quite still. He cried to her, he shook
her, he stood weeping.

He talked to her, his voice a little insane, trying to make her
understand that he had loved her and had left her here only
for her safety —

There was rum in the kitchen, and he went out to gulp down
raw full glasses. They did not affect him.

By evening he strode to the garden, the high and windy gar-
den looking toward the sea, and dug a deep pit. He lifted her
light stiff body, kissed it, and laid it in the pit. All night he
wandered. When he came back to the house and saw the row
of her little dresses with the lines of her soft body in them, he
was terrified.

Then he went to pieces.

He gave up Penrith Lodge, left Twyford's, and moved into

405

a room behind the Surgeon General's office. Beside his cot there
was always a bottle.

Because death had for the first time been brought to him, he
raged, "Oh, damn experimentation!" and, despite Stokes's dis-
may, he gave the phage to everyone who asked.

Only in St. Swithin's, since there his experiment was so ex-
cellently begun, did some remnant of honor keep^him from dis-
tributing the phage universally; but the conduct of this experi-
ment he turned over to Stokes.

Stokes saw that he was a little mad, but only once, when
Martin snarled, "What do I care for your science?" did he try
to hold Martin to his test.

Stokes himself, with Twyford, carried on the experiment and
kept the notes Martin should have kept. By evening, after work-
ing fourteen or fifteen hours since dawn, Stokes would hasten
to St. Swithin's by motor-cycle — he hated the joggling and the
lack of dignity and he found it somewhat dangerous to take
curving hill-roads at sixty miles an hour, but this was the quick-
est way, and till midnight he conferred with Twyford, gave him
orders for the next day, arranged his clumsy annotations, and
marveled at his grim meekness.

Meantime, all day, Martin injected a line of frightened citizens,
in the Surgeon General's office in Blackwater. Stokes begged
him at least to turn the work over to another doctor and take
what interest he could in St. Swithin's, but Martin had a bitter
satisfaction in throwing away all his significance, in helping to
wreck his own purposes.

With a nurse for assistant, he stood in the bare office. File
on file of people, black, white, Hindu, stood in an agitated cue
a block long, ten deep, waiting dumbly, as for death. They crept
up to the nurse beside Martin and in embarrassment exposed
their arms, which she scrubbed with soap and water and dabbled
with alcohol before passing them on to him. He brusquely
pinched up the skin of the upper arm and jabbed it with the
needle of the syringe, cursing at them for jerking, never seeing
their individual faces. As they left him they fluttered with grati-
tude— "Oh, may God bless you, Doctor!" — but he did not hear.

Sometimes Stokes was there, looking anxious, particularly
when in the cue he saw plantation-hands from St. Swithin's,
who were supposed to remain in their parish under strict control,

406

to test the value of the phage. Sometimes Sir Robert Fairlamb
came down to beam and gurgle and offer his aid. . . . Lady
Fairlamb had been injected first of all, and next to her a tattered
kitchen wench, profuse with Hallelujah's.

After a fortnight when he was tired of the drama, he had four
doctors making the injections, while he manufactured phage.

But by night Martin sat alone, tousled, drinking steadily, liv-
ing on whisky and hate, freeing his soul and dissolving his body
by hatred as once hermits dissolved theirs by ecstasy. His life
was as unreal as the nights of an old drunkard. He had an
advantage over normal cautious humanity in not caring whether
he lived or died, he who sat with the dead, talking to Leora and
Sondelius, to Ira Hinkley and Oliver Aiarchand, . to Inchcape
Jones and a shadowy horde of blackmen with lifted appealing
hands.

After Leora's death he had returned to Twyford's but once, to
fetch his baggage, and he had not seen Joyce Lanyon. He hated
her. He swore that it was not her presence which had kept him
from returning earlier to Leora, but he was aware that while he
had been chattering with Joyce, Leora had been dying.

"Damn' glib society climber! Thank God I'll never see her
again!"

He sat on the edge of his cot, in the constricted and airless
room, his hair ruffled, his eyes blotched with red, a stray alley
kitten, which he esteemed his only friend, asleep on his pillow.
At a knock he muttered, "I can't talk to Stokes now. Let him do
his own experiments. Sick of experiments!"

Sulkily, "Oh, come in!"

The door opened on Joyce Lanyon, cool, trim, sure.

"What do you want?" he grunted.

She stared at him; she shut the door; silently she straightened
the litter of food, papers, and instruments on his table. She
coaxed the indignant kitten to a mat, patted the pillow, and sat
by him on the frowsy cot. Then:

"Please! I know what's happened. Cecil is in town for an hour
and I wanted to bring — Won't it comfort you a little if you
know how fond we are of you? Won't you let me offer you
friendship?"

"I don't want anybody's friendship. I haven't any friends I"

407

He sat dumb, her hand on his, but when she was gone he felt
a shiver of new courage.

He could not get himself to give up his reliance on whisky,
and he could see no way of discontinuing the phage-injection
of all who came begging for it, but he turned both injection
and manufacture over to others, and went back to the most rigid
observation of his experiment in St. Swithin's . . . blotted as it
now was by the unphaged portion of the parish going in to
Blackwater to receive the phage.

He did not see Joyce. He lived at the almshouse, but most
evenings now he was sober.

VI

The gospel of rat-extermination had spread through the
island; everybody from five-year-old to hobbling grandam was
out shooting rats and ground squirrels. Whether from phage or
rat-killing or Providence, the epidemic paused, and six months
after Martin's coming, when the West Indian May was broiling
and the season of hurricanes was threatened, the plague had
almost vanished and the quarantine was lifted.

St. Hubert felt safe in its kitchens and shops, and amid the
roaring spring the island rejoiced as a sick man first delivered
from pain rejoices at merely living and being at peace.

That chaffering should be abusive and loud in the public
market, that lovers should stroll unconscious of all save them-
selves, that loafers should tell stories and drink long drinks at
the Ice House, that old men should squat cackling in the shade
of the mangoes, that congregations should sing together to the
Lord — this was no longer ordinary to them nor stupid, but the
bliss of paradise.

They made a festival of the first steamer's leaving. White and
black, Hindu and Chink and Canbbee, they crowded the wharf,
shouting, waving scarfs, trying not to weep at the feeble piping
of what was left of the Blackwater Gold Medal Band; and as
the steamer, the St. la of the McGurk Line, was warped out,
with her captain at the rail of the bridge, very straight, saluting
them with a flourish but his eyes so wet that he could not see
the harbor, they felt that they were no longer jailed lepers but
a part of the free world.

408

On that steamer Joyce Lanyon sailed. Martin said good-by to
her at the wharf.

Strong of hand, almost as tall as he, she looked at him with-
out flutter, and rejoiced, "You've come through. So have I. Both
of us have been mad, trapped here the way we've been. I don't
suppose I helped you, but I did try. You see, I'd never been
trained in reality. You trained me. Good-by."

"Mayn't I come to see you in New York?"

"If you'd really like to."

She was gone, yet she had never been so much with him as
through that tedious hour when the steamer was lost beyond
the horizon, a line edged with silver wire. But that night, in
panic, he fled up to Penrith Lodge and buried his cheek in the
damp soil above the Leora with whom he had never had to
fence and explain, to whom he had never needed to say, "Mayn't
I come to see you?"

But Leora, cold in her last bed, unsmiling, did not answer him
nor comfort him.

VII

Before Martin took leave he had to assemble the notes of his
phage experiment; add the observation of Stokes and Twyford
to his own first precise figures.

As the giver of phage to some thousands of frightened island-
ers, he had become a dignitary. He was called, in the first issue
of the Blac\water Guardian after the quarantine was raised, "the
savior of all our lives." He was the universal hero. If Sondelius
had helped to cleanse them, had Sondelius not been his lieu-
tenant? If it was the intervention of the Lord, as the earnest
old Negro who succeeded Ira Hinkley in the chapels of the
Sanctification Brotherhood insisted, had not the Lord surely sent
him?

No one heeded a wry Scotch doctor, diligent but undramatic
through the epidemic, who hinted that plagues have been known
to slacken and cease without phage.

When Martin was completing his notes he had a letter from
the McGurk Institute, signed by Rippleton Holabird.

Holabird wrote that Gottlieb was "feeling seedy," that he had
resigned the Directorship, suspended his own experimentation

409

and was now at home, resting. Holabird himself had been ap-
pointed Acting Director of the Institute, and as such he chanted:

The reports of your wor\ in the letters from Mr. McGurf(s
agents which the quarantine authorities have permitted to get
through to us apprize us far more than does your own modest
report what a really sensational success you have had. You have
done what few other men living could do, both established the
value of bacteriophage in plague by tests on a large scale, and
saved most of the unfortunate population. The Board of Trus-
tees and I are properly appreciative of the glory which you have
added, and still more will add when your report is published,
to the name of McGur\ Institute, and we are thinking, now that
we may for some months be unable to have your titular chief,
Dr. Gottlieb, working with us, of establishing a separate De-
partment, with you as its head.

"Established the value — rats! I about half made the tests,"
sighed Martin, and: "Department! I've given too many orders
here. Sick of authority. I want to get back to my lab and start
all over again."

It came to him that now he would probably have ten thou-
sand a year. . . . Leora would have enjoyed small extravagant
dinners.

Though he had watched Gottlieb declining, it was a shock
that he could be so unwell as to drop his work even for a few
months.

He forgot his own self as it came to him that in giving up
his experiment, playing the savior, he had been a traitor to
Gottlieb and all that Gottlieb represented. When he returned to
New York he would have to call on the old man and admit to
him, to those sunken relentless eyes, that he did not have com-
plete proof of the value of the phage.

If he could have run to Leora with his ten thousand a year —

VIII

He left St. Hubert three weeks after Joyce Lanyon.

The evening before his sailing, a great dinner with Sir Robert
Fairlamb in the chair was given to him and to Stokes. While
Sir Robert ruddily blurted compliments and Kellett tried to

410

explain things, and all of them drank to him, standing, after
the toast to the King, Martin sat lonely, considering that tomor-
row he would leave these trusting eyes and face the harsh de-
mands of Gottlieb, of Terry Wickett.

The more they shouted his glory, the more he thought about
what unknown, tight-minded scientists in distant laboratories
would say of a man who had had his chance and cast it away.
The more they called him the giver of life, the more he felt
himself disgraced and a traitor; and as he looked at Stokes he
saw in his regard a pity worse than condemnation.

4"

CHAPTER XXXVI

IT happened that Martin returned to New York, as he had
come, on the St. Bury an. The ship was haunted with the
phantoms of Leora dreaming, of Sondelius shouting on the
bridge.

And on the St. Bury an was the country-club Miss Gwilliam
who had offended Sondelius.

She had spent the winter importantly making notes on native
music in Trinidad and Caracas; at least in planning to make
notes. She saw Martin come aboard at Blackwater, and pertly
noted the friends who saw him off — two Englishmen, one puffy,
one rangy, and a dry-looking Scotsman.

"Your friends all seem to be British," she enlightened him,
when she had claimed him as an old friend.

"Yes."

"You've spent the winter here."

"Yes."

"Hard luck to be caught by the quarantine. But I told you
you were silly to go ashore! You must have managed to pick
up quite a little money practicing. But it must have been un-
pleasant, really."

"Ye-es, I suppose it was."

"I told you it would be! You ought to have come on to
Trinidad. Such a fascinating island! And tell me, how is the
Roughneck?"

"Who?"

"Oh, you know — that funny. Swede that used to dance and
everything."

"He is dead."

"Oh, I am sorry. You know, no matter what the others said,
I never thought he was so bad. I'm sure he had quite a nice

412

cultured mind, when he wasn't carousing around. Your wife

isn't with you, is she?"
"No — she isn't with me. I must go down and unpack now."
Miss Gwilliam looked after him with an expression which said

that the least people could do was to learn some manners.

ii

With the heat and the threat of hurricanes, there were few
first-class passengers on the St. Buryan, and most of these did
not count, because they were not jolly, decent Yankee tourists
but merely South Americans. As tourists do when their minds
have been broadened and enriched by travel, when they return
to New Jersey or Wisconsin with the credit of having spent a
whole six months in the West Indies and South America, the
respectable remnant studied one another fastidiously, and noted
the slim pale man who seemed so restless, who all day trudged
round the deck, who after midnight was seen standing by him-
self at the rail.

"That guy looks awful' restless to me!" said Mr. S. Sanborn
Hibble of Detroit to the charming Mrs. Dawson of Memphis,
and she answered, with the wit which made her so popular
wherever she went, "Yes, don't he. I reckon he must be in love!"

"Oh, I know him!" said Miss Gwilliam. "He and his wife
were on the St. Buryan when I came down. She's in New York
now. He's some kind of a doctor — not awful' successful I don't
believe. Just between ourselves, I don't think much of him or
of her either. They sat and looked stupid all the way down."

in

Martin was itching to get his fingers on his test-tubes. He
knew, as once he had guessed, that he hated administration and
Large Affairs.

As he tramped the deck, his head cleared and he was himself.
Angrily he pictured the critics who would soon be pecking at
whatever final report he might make. For a time he hated the
criticism of his fellow laboratory-grinds as he had hated their
competition; he hated the need of forever looking over his shoul-
der at pursuers. But on a night when he stood at the rail for

413

hours, he admitted that he was afraid of their criticism, and
afraid because his experiment had so many loopholes. He hurled
overboard all the polemics with which he had protected him-
self: "Men who never have had the experience of trying, in the
midst of an epidemic, to remain calm and keep experimental
conditions, do not realize in the security of their laboratories
what one has to contend with."

Constant criticism was good, if only it was not spiteful, jealous,
petty-
No, even then it might be good! Some men had to be what
easy-going workers called "spiteful." To them the joyous spite
of crushing the almost-good was more natural than creation.
Why should a great house-wrecker, who could clear the cum-
bered ground, be set at trying to lay brick?

"All right!" he rejoiced. "Let era come! Maybe I'll anticipate
'em and publish a roast of my own work. I have got something,
from the St. Swithin test, even if I did let things slide for a
while. I'll take my tables to a biometrician. He may rip 'em up.
Good! What's left, I'll publish."

He went to bed feeling that he could face the eyes of Gottlieb
and Terry, and for the first time in weeks he slept without terror.

IV

At the pier in Brooklyn, to the astonishment and slight indig-
nation of Miss Gwilliam, Mr. S. Sanborn Hibble, and Mrs.
Dawson, Martin was greeted by reporters who agreeably though
vaguely desired to know what were these remarkable things he
had been doing to some disease or other, in some island some
place.

He was rescued from them by Rippleton Holabird, who burst
through them with his hands out, crying, "Oh, my dear fellow!
We know all that's happened. We grieve for you so, and we're
so glad you were spared to come back to us."

Whatever Martin might, under the shadow of Max Gottlieb,
have said about Holabird, now he wrung his hands and mut-
tered, "It's good to be home."

Holabird (he was wearing a blue shirt with a starched blue
collar, like an actor) could not wait till Martin's baggage had
gone through the customs. He had to return to his duties as

414

Acting Director of the Institute. He delayed only to hint that
the Board of Trustees were going to make him full Director,
and that certainly, my dear fellow, he would see that Martin
had the credit and the reward he deserved.

When Holabird was gone, driving away in his neat coupe (he
often explained that his wife and he could afford a chauffeur,
but they preferred to spend the money on other things), Martin
was conscious of Terry Wickett, leaning against a gnawed
wooden pillar of the wharf-house, as though he had been there
for hours.

Terry strolled up and snorted, "Hello, Slim. All O.K.? Lez
shoot the stuff through the customs. Great pleasure to see the
Director and you kissing."

As they drove through the summer-walled streets of Brooklyn,
Martin inquired, "How's Holabird working out as Director?
And how is Gottlieb?"

"Oh, the Holy Wren is no worse than Tubbs; he's even politer
and more ignorant. . . . Me, you watch me! One of these days
I'm going off to the woods — got a shack in Vermont — going to
work there without having to produce results for the Director!
They've stuck me in the Department of Bio-chemistry. And
Gottlieb — " Terry's voice became anxious. "I guess he's pretty
shaky — They've pensioned him off. Now look, Slim; I hear
you're going to be a gilded department-head, and I'll never be
anything but an associate member. Are you going on with me,
or are you going to be one of the Holy Wren's pets — hero-
scientist?"

"I'm with you, Terry, you old grouch." Martin dropped the
cynicism which had always seemed proper between him and
Terry. "I haven't got anybody else. Leora and Gustaf are gone
and now maybe Gottlieb. You and I have got to stick together!''

"It's a go!"

They shook hands, they coughed gruffly, and talked of straw
hats.

When Martin entered the Institute, his colleagues galloped up
to shake hands and to exclaim, and if their praise was flustering,
there is no time at which one can stomach so much of it as at
home-coming.

415

Sir Robert Fairlamb had written to the Institute a letter glori-
fying him. The letter arrived on the same boat with Martin, and
next day Holabird gave it out to the press.

The reporters, who had been only a little interested at his
landing, came around for interviews, and while Martin was
sulky and jerky Holabird took them in hand, so that the papers
were able to announce that America, which was always rescuing
the world from something or other, had gone and done it again.
It was spread in the prints that Dr. Martin Arrowsmith was not
only a powerful witch-doctor and possibly something of a labora-
tory-hand, but also a ferocious rat-killer, village-burner, Special
Board addresser, and snatcher from death. There was at the
time, in certain places, a doubt as to how benevolent the United
States had been to its Little Brothers — Mexico, Cuba, Haiti,
Nicaragua — and the editors and politicians were grateful to
Martin for this proof of their sacrifice and tender watchfulness.

He had letters from the Public Health service; from an enter-
prising Midwestern college which desired to make him a Doctor
of Civil Law; from medical schools and societies which begged
him to address them. Editorials on his work appeared in the
medical journals and the newspapers; and Congressman Almus
Pickerbaugh telegraphed him from Washington, in what the
Congressman may conceivably have regarded as verse: "They
got to go some to get ahead of fellows that come from old
Nautilus." And he was again invited to dinner at the McGurks',
not by Capitola but by Ross McGurk, whose name had never
had such a whitewashing.

He refused all invitations to speak, and the urgent organiza-
tions which had invited him responded with meekness that they
understood how intimidatingly busy Dr. Arrowsmith was, and
if he ever could find the time, they would be most highly
honored —

Rippleton Holabird was elected full Director now, in succes-
sion to Gottlieb, and he sought to use Martin as the prize exhibit
of the Institute. He brought all the visiting dignitaries, all the
foreign Men of Measured Merriment, in to see him, and they
looked pleased and tried to think up questions. Then Martin
was made head of the new Department of Microbiology at twice
his old salary.

He never did learn what was the difference between micro-

416

biology and bacteriology. But none of his glorification could he
resist. He was still too dazed — he was the more dazed when he
had seen Max Gottlieb.

VI

The morning after his return he had telephoned to Gottlieb's
flat, had spoken to Miriam and received permission to call in
the late afternoon.

All the way uptown he could hear Gottlieb saying, "You
were my son! I gave you eferyt'ing I knew of truth and honor,
and you haf betrayed me. Get out of my sight!"

Miriam met him in the hall, fretting, "I don't know if I should
have let you come at all, Doctor."

"Why? Isn't he well enough to see people?"

"It isn't that. He doesn't really seem ill, except that he's feeble,
but he doesn't know anyone. The doctors say it's senile dementia.
His memory is gone. And he's just suddenly forgotten all his
English. He can only speak German, and I can't speak it, hardly
at all. If I'd only studied it, instead of music! But perhaps it
may do him good to have you here. He was always so fond of
you. You don't know how he talked of you and the splendid
experiment you've been doing in St. Hubert."

"Well, I—" He could find nothing to say.

Miriam led him into a room whose walls were dark with
books. Gottlieb was sunk in a worn chair, his thin hand lax on
the arm.

"Doctor, it's Arrowsmith, just got back!" Martin mumbled.

The old man looked as though he half understood; he peered
at him, then shook his head and whimpered, "Versteh' nicht."
His arrogant eyes were clouded with ungovernable slow tears.

Martin understood that never could he be punished now and
cleansed. Gottlieb had sunk into his darkness still trusting him.

VII

Martin closed his flat — their flat — with a cold swift fury, lest
he yield to his misery in finding among Leora's possessions a
thousand fragments which brought her back: the frock she had
bought for Capitola McGurk's dinner, a petrified chocolate she
had hidden away to munch illegally by night, a memorandum,

417

"Get almonds for Sandy." He took a grimly impersonal room in
a hotel, and sunk himself in work. There was nothing for him
but work and the harsh friendship of Terry Wickett.

His first task was to check the statistics of his St. Swithin
treatments and the new figures still coming in from Stokes.
Some of them were shaky, some suggested that the value of
phage certainly had been confirmed, but there was nothing final.
He took his figures to Raymond Pearl the biometrician, who
thought less of them than did Martin himself.

He had already made a report of his work to the Director and
the Trustees of the Institute, with no conclusion except "the
results await statistical analysis and should have this before they
are published." But Holabird had run wild, the newspapers had
reported wonders, and in on Martin poured demands that he
send out phage; inquiries as to whether he did not have a phage
for tuberculosis, for syphilis; offers that he take charge of this
epidemic and that.

Pearl had pointed out that his agreeable results in first phaging
the whole of Carib village must be questioned, because it was
possible that when he began the curve of the disease had already
passed its peak. With this and the other complications, viewing
his hot work in St. Hubert as coldly as though it were the pre-
tense of a man whom he had never seen, Martin decided that
he had no adequate proof, and strode in to see the Director.

Holabird was gentle and pretty, but he sighed that if this
conclusion were published, he would have to take back all the
things he had said about the magnificence which, presumably,
he had inspired his subordinate to accomplish. He was gentle
and pretty, but firm; Martin was to suppress (Holabird did not
say "suppress" — he said "leave to me for further consideration")
the real statistical results, and issue the report with an ambigu-
ous summary.

Martin was furious, Holabird delicately relentless. Martin
hastened to Terry, declaring that he would resign — would de-
nounce— would expose — Yes! He would! He no longer had to
support Leora. He'd work as a drug-clerk. He'd go back right
now and tell the Holy Wren —

"Hey! Slim! Wait a minute! Hold your horses!" observed
Terry. "Just get along with Holy for a while, and we'll work
out something we can do together and be independent. Mean-

418

while you have got your lab here, and you still have some physi-
cal chemistry to learn! And, uh — Slim, I haven't said anything
about your St. Hubert stuff, but you know and I know you
bunged it up badly. Can you come into court with clean hands,
if you're going to indict the Holy One ? Though I do agree that
aside from being a dirty, lying, social-climbing, sneaking, power-
grabbing hypocrite, he's all right. Hold on. We'll fix up some-
thing. Why, son, we've just been learning our science; we're just
beginning to work."

Then Holabird published officially, under the Institute's seal,
Martin's original report to the Trustees, with such quaint revi-
sions as a change of "the results should have analysis" to "while
statistical analysis would seem desirable, it is evident that this
new treatment has accomplished all that had been hoped."

Again Martin went mad, again Terry calmed him; and with
a hard fury unlike his eagerness of the days when he had known
that Leora was waiting for him he resumed his physical chem-
istry.

He learned the involved mysteries of freezing-point deter-
minations, osmotic pressure determinations, and tried to apply
Northrop's generalizations on enzymes to the study of phage.

He became absorbed in mathematical laws which strangely
predicted natural phenomena; his world was cold, exact, aus-
terely materialistic, bitter to those who founded their logic on
impressions. He was daily more scornful toward the counters of
paving stones, the renamers of species, the compilers of irrelevant
data. In his absorption the pleasant seasons passed unseen.

Once he raised his head in astonishment to perceive that it
was spring; once Terry and he tramped two hundred miles
through the Pennsylvania hills, by summer roads; but it seemed
only a day later when it was Christmas, and Holabird was being
ever so jolly and yuley about the Institute.

The absence of Gottlieb may have been good for Martin, since
he no longer turned to the master for solutions in tough queries.
When he took up diffusion problems, he began to develop his
own apparatus, and whether it was from inborn ingenuity or
merely from a fury of labor, he was so competent that he won
from Terry the almost overwhelming praise: "Why, that's not
so darn' bad, Slim!"

The sureness to which Max Gottlieb seems to have been born

4*9

came to Martin slowly, after many stumblings, but it came. He
desired a perfection of technique in the quest for absolute and
provable fact; he desired as greatly as any Pater to "burn with
a hard gem-like flame," and he desired not to have ease and
repute in the market-place, but rather to keep free of those follies,
lest they confuse him and make him soft.

Holabird was as much bewildered as Tubbs would have been
by the ramifications of Martin's work. What did he think he
was anyway — a bacteriologist or a bio-physicist? But Holabird
was won by the scientific world's reception of Martin's first im-
portant paper, on the effect of X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays
on the anti-Shiga phage. It was praised in Paris and Brussels and
Cambridge as much as in New York, for its insight and for "the
clarity and to perhaps be unscientifically enthusiastic, the sheer
delight and style of its presentation," as Professor Berkeley
Wurtz put it; which may be indicated by quoting the first para-
graph of the paper :

In a preliminary publication, I have reported a marked quali-
tative destructive effect of the radiations from radium emana-
tions on Bacteriophage-anti-Shiga. In the present paper it is
shown that X-rays, gamma rays, and beta rays produce identical
inactivating effects on this bacteriophage . Furthermore, a quan-
titative relation is demonstrated to exist between this inactivation
and the radiations that produce it. The results obtained from this
quantitative study permit the statement that the percentage of
inactivation, as measured by determining the units of bacterio-
phage remaining after irradiation by gamma and beta rays of a
suspension of fixed virulence, is a function of the two variables,
millicuries and hours. The following equation accounts quanti-
tatively for the experimental results obtained:

Xlogc^
K =

E0(e - Xti)

When Director Holabird saw the paper — Yeo was vicious
enough to take it in and ask his opinion — he said, "Splendid,
oh, I say, simply splendid! I've just had the chance to skim
through it, old boy, but I shall certainly read it carefully, the
first free moment I have."

420

CHAPTER XXXVII

MARTIN did not see Joyce Lanyon for weeks after
his return to New York. Once she invited him to
dinner, but he could not come, and he did not hear
from her again.

His absorption in osmotic pressure determinations did not con-
tent him when he sat in his prim hotel room and was reduced
from Dr. Arrowsmith to a man who had no one to talk to. He
remembered how they had sat by the lagoon in the tepid twi-
light; he telephoned asking whether he might come in for tea.

He knew in an unformulated way that Joyce was rich, but
after seeing her in gingham, cooking in the kitchen of St.
Swithin's almshouse, he did not grasp her position; and he was
uncomfortable when, feeling dusty from the laboratory, he came
to her great house and found her the soft-voiced mistress of
many servants. Hers was a palace, and palaces, whether they are
such very little ones as Joyce's, with its eighteen rooms, or Buck-
ingham or vast Fontainebleau, are all alike; they are choked
with the superfluities of pride, they are so complete that one
does not remember small endearing charms, they are indistin-
guishable in their common feeling of polite and uneasy grandeur,
they are therefore altogether tedious.

But amid the pretentious splendor which Roger Lanyon had
accumulated, Joyce was not tedious. It is to be suspected that she
enjoyed showing Martin what she really was, by producing foot-
men and too many kinds of sandwiches, and by boasting, "Oh,
I never do know what they're going to give me for tea."

But she had welcomed him, crying, "You look so much better.
I'm frightfully glad. Are you still my brother? I was a good
cook at the almshouse, wasn't I!"

Had he been suave then and witty, she would not have been

421

greatly interested. She knew too many men who were witty ana
well-bred, ivory smooth and competent to help her spend the
four or five million dollars with which she was burdened. But
Martin was at once a scholar who made osmotic pressure deter-
minations almost interesting, a taut swift man whom she could
fancy running or making love, and a lonely youngster who
naively believed that here in her soft security she was still the
girl who had sat with him by the lagoon, still the courageous
woman who had come to him in a drunken room at Blackwater.

Joyce Lanyon knew how to make men talk. Thanks more to
her than to his own articulateness, he made living the Institute,
the members, their feuds, and the drama of coursing on the
trail of a discovery.

Her easy life here had seemed tasteless after the risks of St.
Hubert, and in his contempt for ease and rewards she found
exhilaration.

He came now and then to tea, to dinner; he learned the ways
of her house, her servants, the more nearly intelligent of her
friends. He liked — and possibly he was liked by — some of them.
With one friend of hers Martin had a state of undeclared war.
This was Latham Ireland, an achingly well-dressed man of fifty,
a competent lawyer who was fond of standing in front of fire-
places and being quietly clever. He fascinated Joyce by telling
her that she was subtle, then telling her what she was being
subtle about.

Martin hated him.

In midsummer Martin was invited for a week-end at Joyce's
vast blossom-hid country house at Greenwich. She was half
apologetic for its luxury; he was altogether unhappy.

The strain of considering clothes, of galloping out to buy
white trousers when he wanted to watch the test-tubes in the
constant-temperature bath, of trying to look easy in the limou-
sine which met him at the station, and of deciding which ser-
vants to tip and how much and when, was dismaying to a
simple man. He felt rustic when, after he had blurted, "Just a
minute till I go up and unpack my suit-case," she said gently,
"Oh, that will have been done for you."

He discovered that a valet had laid out for him to put on,
that first evening, all the small store of underclothes he had

422

brought, and had squeezed out on his brush a ribbon of tooth-
paste.

He sat on the edge of his bed, groaning, "This is too rich for
my blood!"

He hated and feared that valet, who kept stealing his clothes,
putting them in places where they could not be found, then
popping in menacingly when Martin was sneaking about the
enormous room looking for them.

But his chief unhappiness was that there was nothing to do.
He had no sport but tennis, at which he was too rusty to play
with these chattering unidentified people who filled the house
and, apparently with perfect willingness, worked at golf and
bridge. He had met but few of the friends of whom they talked.
They said, "You know dear old R. G.," and he said, "Oh, yes"
but he never did know dear old R. G.

Joyce was as busily amiable as when they were alone at tea,
and she found for him a weedy flapper whose tennis was worse
than his own, but she had twenty guests — forty at Sunday lunch
— and he gave up certain agreeable notions of walking with
her in fresh lanes and, after excitedly saying this and that, per-
haps kissing her. He had one moment with her. As he was
going, she ordered, "Come here, Martin," and led him apart.

"You haven't really enjoyed it."

"Why, sure, course I — "

"Of course you haven't! And you despise us, rather, and per-
haps you're partly right. I do like pretty people and gracious
manners and good games, but I suppose they seem piffling after
nights in a laboratory."

"No, I like 'em too. In a way. I like to look at beautiful
women — at you! But — Oh, darn it, Joyce, I'm not up to it. I've
always been poor and horribly busy. I haven't learned your
games."

"But, Martin, you could, with the intensity you put into every-
thing."

"Even getting drunk in Blackwater!"

"And I hope in New York, too! Dear Roger, he did have
such an innocent, satisfying time getting drunk at class-dinners!
But I mean: if you went at it, you could play bridge and golf —
and talking — better than any of them. If you only knew how
frightfully recent most of the ducal class in America are! And

423

Martin : wouldn't it be good for you ? Wouldn't you work all the
better if you got away from your logarithmic tables now and
then? And are you going to admit there's anything you can't
conquer?"

"No, I—"

"Will you come to dinner on Tuesday week, just us two, and
we'll fight it out?"

"Be glad to."

For a number of hours, on the train to Terry Wickett's vaca-
tion place in the Vermont hills, Martin was convinced that he
loved Joyce Lanyon, and that he was going to attack the art of
being amusing as he had attacked physical chemistry. Ardently,
and quite humorlessly, as he sat stiffly in a stale Pullman chair-
ed with his feet up on his suit-case, he pictured himself wear-
ing a club-tie (presumably first acquiring the tie and the club),
playing golf in plus-fours, and being entertaining about dear old
R. G. and incredibly witty about dear old Latham Ireland's aged
Rolls-Royce.

But these ambitions he forgot as he came to Terry's proud
proprietary shanty, by a lake among oaks and maples, and heard
Terry's real theories of the decomposition of quinine derivatives.

Being perhaps the least sentimental of human beings, Terry
had named his place "Birdies' Rest." He owned five acres of
woodland, two miles from a railroad station. His shanty was a
two-room arTair of logs, with bunks for beds and oilcloth for
table-linen.

"Here's the layout, Slim," said Terry. "Some day I'm going
to figure out a way of making a lab here pay, by manufacturing
sera or something, and I'll put up a couple more buildings on
the flat by the lake, and have one absolutely independent place
for science — two hours a day on the commercial end, and say
about six for sleeping and a couple for feeding and telling dirty
stories. That leaves — two and six and two make ten, if I'm any
authority on higher math — that leaves fourteen hours a day for
research (except when you got something special on), with no
Director and no Society patrons and no Trustees that you've got
to satisfy by making fool reports. Of course there won't be any
scientific dinners with ladies in candy-box dresses, but I figure
we'll be able to afford plenty of salt pork and corncob pipes,

424

and your bed will be made perfectly — if you make it yourself.
Huh? Lez go and have a swim."

Martin returned to New York with the not very compatible
plans of being the best-dressed golfer in Greenwich and of cock-
ing beef-stew with Terry at Birdies' Rest.

But the first of these was the more novel to him.

ii

Joyce Lanyon was enjoying a conversion. Her St. Hubert ex-
periences and her natural variability had caused .her to be dis-
satisfied with Roger's fast-motoring set.

She let the lady Maecenases of her acquaintance beguile her
into several of their Causes, and she enjoyed them as she had
enjoyed her active and entirely purposeless war work in 1917,
for Joyce Lanyon was to some degree an Arranger, which was
an epithet invented by Terry Wickett for Capitola McGurk.

An Arranger and even an Improver was Joyce, but she was
not a Capitola; she neither waved a feathered fan and spoke
spaciously, nor did she take out her sex-passion in talking. She
was fine and occasionally gorgeous, with tiger in her, though
she was as far from perfumed-boudoir and black-lingerie passion
as she was from Capitola's cooing staleness. Hers was sheer
straight white silk and cherished skin.

Behind all her reasons for valuing Martin was the fact that
the only time in her life when she had felt useful and independ-
ent was when she had been an almshouse cook.

She might have drifted on, in her world of drifters, but for
the interposition of Latham Ireland, the lawyer-dilettante-lover.

"Joy," he observed, "there seems to be an astounding quantity
of that Dr. Arrowsmith person about the place. As your benign
uncle—"

"Latham, my sweet, I quite agree that Martin is too aggressive,
thoroughly unlicked, very selfish, rather a prig, absolutely a
pedant, and his shirts are atrocious. And I rather think I shall
marry him. I almost think I love him!"

"Wouldn't cyanide be a neater way of doing suicide?" said
Latham Ireland.

425

Ill

What Martin felt for Joyce was what any widowed man of
thirty-eight would feel for a young and pretty and well-spoken
woman who was attentive to his wisdom. As to her wealth,
there was no problem at all. He was no poor man marrying
money! Why, he was making ten thousand a year, which was
eight thousand more than he needed to live on!

Occasionally he was suspicious of her dependence on luxury.
With tremendous craft he demanded that instead of their dining
in her Jacobean hall of state, she come with him on his own sort
of party. She came, with enthusiasm. They went to abysmal
Greenwich Village restaurants with candles, artistic waiters, and
no food; or to Chinatown dives with food and nothing else. He
even insisted on their taking the subway — though after dinner
he usually forgot that he was being Spartan, and ordered a taxi-
cab. She accepted it all without either wincing or too much
gurgling.

She played tennis with him in the court on her roof; she
taught him bridge, which, with his concentration and his mem-
ory, he soon played better than she and enjoyed astonishingly;
she persuaded him that he had a leg and would look well in golf
clothes.

He came to take her to dinner, on a serene autumn evening.
He had a taxi waiting.

"Why don't we stick to the subway?" she said.

They were standing on her doorstep, in a blankly expensive
and quite unromantic street off Fifth Avenue.

"Oh, I hate the rotten subway as much as you do! Elbows in
my stomach never did help me much to plan experiments. I
expect when we're married I'll enjoy your limousine."

"Is this a proposal? I'm not at all sure I'm going to marry
you. Really, I'm not! You have no sense of ease!"

They were married the following January, in St. George's
Church, and Martin suffered almost as much over the flowers,
the bishop, die relatives with high-pitched voices, and the top
hat which Joyce had commanded, as he did over having Ripple-
ton Holabird wring his hand with a look of, "At last, dear boy,
you have come out of barbarism and become One of Us."

Martin had asked Terry to be his best man. Terry had refused,

426

and asserted that only with pain would he come to the wedding
at all. The best man was Dr. William Smith, with his beard
trimmed for the occasion, and distressing morning clothes and
a topper which he had bought in London eleven years before,
but both of them were safe in charge of a cousin of Joyce who
was guaranteed to have extra handkerchiefs and to recognize
the Wedding March. He had understood that Martin was Gro-
ton and Harvard, and when he discovered that he was Winne-
mac and nothing at all, he became suspicious.

In their stateroom on the steamer Joyce murmured, "Dear,
you were brave! I didn't know what a damn' fool that cousin
of mine was. Kiss me!"

Thenceforth . . . except for a dreadful second when Leora
floated between them, eyes closed and hands crossed on her pale
cold breast . . . they were happy and in each other found adven-
turous new ways.

IV

For three months they wandered in Europe.

On the first day Joyce had said, "Let's have this beastly money
thing over. I should think you are the least mercenary of men.
I've put ten thousand dollars to your credit in London — oh, yes,
and fifty thousand in New York — and if you'd like, when you
have to do things for me, I'd be glad if you'd draw on it. No!
Wait! Can't you see how easy and decent I want to make it all?
You won't hurt me to save your own self-respect?"

They really had, it seemed, to stay with the Principessa del
Oltraggio (formerly Miss Lucy Deemy Bessy of Dayton),
Madame des Basses Loges (Miss Brown of San Francisco), and
the Countess of Marazion (who had been Mrs. Arthur Snaipe
of Albany, and several things before that), but Joyce did go
with him to see the great laboratories in London, Paris, Copen-
hagen. She swelled to perceive how Nobel-prize winners re-
ceived Her Husband, knew of him, desired to be violent with
him about phage, and showed him their work of years. Some
of them were hasty and graceless, she thought. Her Man was
prettier than any of them, and if she would but be patient with

427

him, she could make him master polo and clothes and conversa-
tion . . . but of course go on with his science ... a pity he
could not have a knighthood, like one or two of the British
scientists they met. But even in America there were honorary
degrees. . . .

While she discovered and digested Science, Martin discovered
Women.

VI

Aware only of Madeline Fox and Orchid Pickerbaugh, who
were Nice American Girls, of soon-forgotten ladies of the night,
and of Leora who, in her indolence, her indifference to decora-
tion and good fame, was neither woman nor wife but only her
own self, Martin knew nothing whatever about Women. He
had expected Leora to wait for him, to obey his wishes, to
understand without his saying them all the flattering things he
had planned to say. He was spoiled, and Joyce was not timor-
ous about telling him so.

It was not for her to sit beaming and wordless while he and
his fellow-researchers arranged the world. With many jolts he
perceived that even outside the bedroom he had to consider the
fluctuations and variables of his wife, as A Woman, and some-
times as A Rich Woman.

It was confusing to find that where Leora had acidly claimed
sex-loyalty but had hummingly not cared in what manner he
might say Good Morning, Joyce was indifferent as to how many
women he might have fondled (so long as he did not insult her
by making love to them in her presence) but did require him
to say Good Morning as though he meant it. It was confusing
to find how starkly she discriminated between his caresses when
he was absorbed in her and his hasty interest when he wanted
to go to sleep. She could, she said, kill a man who considered
her merely convenient furniture, and she uncomfortably empha-
sized the "kill."

She expected him to remember her birthday, her taste in wine,
her liking for flowers, and her objection to viewing the process
of shaving. She wanted a room to herself; she insisted that he
knock before entering; and she demanded that he admire her
hats.

When he was so interested in the work at Pasteur Institute

428

that he had a clerk telephone that he would not be able to meet
her for dinner, she was tight-lipped with rage.

"Oh, you got to expect that," he reflected, feeling that he was
being tactful and patient and penetrating.

It annoyed him, sometimes, that she would never impulsively
start off on a walk with him. No matter how brief the jaunty
she must first go to her room for white gloves — placidly stand
there drawing them on. . . . And in London she made him buy
spats . . . and even wear them.

Joyce was not only an Arranger — she was a Loyalist. Like
most American cosmopolites she revered the English peerage,
adopted all their standards and beliefs — or what she considered
their standards and beliefs — and treasured her encounters with
them. Three and a half years after the War of 1914-18, she still
said that she loathed all Germans, and the one complete quarrel
between her and Martin occurred when he desired to see the
laboratories in Berlin and Vienna.

But for all their differences it was a romantic pilgrimage.
They loved fearlessly; they tramped through the mountains
and came back to revel in vast bathrooms and ingenious din-
ners; they idled before cafes, and save when he fell silent as
he remembered how much Leora had wanted to sit before cafes
in France, they showed each other all the eagernesses of their
minds.

Europe, her Europe, which she had always known and loved,
Joyce offered to him on generous hands, and he who had ever
been sensitive to warm colors and fine gestures — when he was
not frenzied with work — was grateful to her and boyish with
wonder. He believed that he was learning to take life easily
and beautifully; he criticized Terry Wickett (but only to him-
self) for provincialism; and so in a golden leisure they came
back to America and prohibition and politicians charging to
protect the Steel Trust from the communists, to conversation
about bridge and motors and to osmotic pressure determina-
tions.

429

CHAPTER XXXVIII

DIRECTOR RIPPLETON HOLABIRD had also mar-
ried money, and whenever his colleagues hinted that
since his first ardent work in physiology he had done
nothing but arrange a few nicely selected flowers on the tables
hewn out by other men, it was a satisfaction to him to observe
that these rotters came down to the Institute by subway, while
he drove elegantly in his coupe. But now Arrowsmith, once
the poorest of them all, came by limousine with a chauffeur who
touched his hat, and Holabird's coflfee was salted.

There was a simplicity in Martin, but it cannot be said that
he did not lick his lips when Holabird mooned at the chauf-
feur.

His triumph over Holabird was less than being able to enter-
tain Angus Duer and his wife, on from Chicago; to introduce
them to Director Holabird, to Salamon the king of surgeons,
and to a medical baronet; and to have Angus gush, "Mart, do
you mind my saying we're all awfully proud of you? Rounce-
field was speaking to me about it the other day. 'It may be
presumptuous,' he said, 'but I really feel that perhaps the
training we tried to give Dr. Arrowsmith here in the Clinic did
in some way contribute to his magnificent work in the West
Indies and at McGurk.' What a lovely woman your wife is,
old man! Do you suppose she'd mind telling Mrs. Duer where
she got that frock?"

Martin had heard about the superiority of poverty to luxury,
but after the lunch-wagons of Mohalis, after twelve years of
helping Leora check the laundry and worry about the price of
steak, after a life of waiting in the slush for trolleys, it was
not at all dismaying to have a valet who produced shirts auto-
matically; not at all degrading to come to meals which were

430

always interesting, and, in the discretion of his car, to lean an
aching head against softness and think how clever he was.

"You see, by having other people do the vulgar things for
you, it saves your own energy for the things that only you can
do," said Joyce.

Martin agreed, then drove to Westchester for a lesson in golf.

A week after their return from Europe, Joyce went with him
to see Gottlieb. He fancied that Gottlieb came out of his
brooding to smile on them.

"After all," Martin- considered, "the old man did like beau-
tiful things. If he'd had the chance, he might' ve liked a big
Establishment, too, maybe."

Terry was surprisingly complaisant.

"I'll tell you, Slim — if you want to know. Personally I'd hate
to have to live up to servants. But I'm getting old and wise.
I figure that different folks like different things, and awful'
few of 'em have the sense to come and ask me what they ought
to like. But honest, Slim, I don't think I'll come to dinner.
I've gone and bought a dress-suit — bought it! — got it in my
room — damn' landlady keeps filling it with moth-balls — but
I don't think I could stand listening to Latham Ireland being
clever."

It was, however, Rippleton Holabird's attitude which most
concerned Martin, for Holabird did not let him forget that
unless he desired to drift off and be merely a ghostly Rich
Woman's husband, he would do well to remember who was
Director.

Along with the endearing manners which he preserved for
Ross McGurk, Holabird had developed the remoteness, the in-
human quiet courtesy, of the Man of Affairs, and people who
presumed on his old glad days he courteously put in their
places. He saw the need of repressing insubordination, when
Arrowsmith appeared in a limousine. He gave him one week
after his return to enjoy the limousine, then blandly called on
him in his laboratory.

"Martin," he sighed, "I find that our friend Ross McGurk
is just a bit dissatisfied with the practical results that are
coming out of the Institute and, to convince him, I'm afraid I
really must ask you to put less emphasis on bacteriophage for
the moment and take up influenza. The Rockefeller Institute

431

has the right idea. They've utilized their best minds, and
spent money magnificently, on such problems as pneumonia,
meningitis, cancer. They've already lessened the terrors of
meningitis and pneumonia, and yellow fever is on the verge of*
complete abolition through Noguchi's work, and I have no
doubt that their hospital, with its enormous resources and
splendidly co-operating minds, will be the first to find something
to alleviate diabetes. Now, I understand, they're hot after the
cause of influenza. They're not going to permit another great
epidemic of it. Well, dear chap, it's up to us to beat them on
the flu, and I've chosen you to represent us in the race."

Martin was at the moment hovering over a method of re-
producing phage on dead bacteria, but he could not refuse, he
could not risk being discharged. He was too rich! Martin the
renegade medical student could flounder off and be a soda-
clerk, but if the husband of Joyce Lanyon should indulge in
such insanity, he would be followed by reporters and photo-
graphed at the soda handles. Still less could he chance becom-
ing merely her supported husband — a butler of the boudoir.

He assented, not very pleasantly.

He began to work on the cause of influenza with a half-
heartedness almost magnificent. In the hospitals he secured
cultures from cases which might be influenza and might be bad
colds — no one was certain just what the influenza symptoms
were; nothing was clean cut. He left most of the work to his
assistants, occasionally giving them sardonic directions to "put
on another hundred tubes of the A medium— hell, make it
another thousand!" and when he found that they were doing
as they pleased, he was not righteous nor rebuking. If he did
not guiltily turn his hand from the plow it was only because
he never touched the plow. Once his own small laboratory
had been as fussily neat as a New Hampshire kitchen. Now
the several rooms under his charge were a disgrace, with long
racks of abandoned test-tubes, many half-filled with mold, none
of them properly labeled.

Then he had his idea. He began firmly to believe that the
Rockefeller investigators had found the cause of flu. He
gushed in to Holabird and told him so. As for himself, he
was going back to his search for the real nature of phage.

Holabird argued that Martin must be wrong. If Holabird

432

wanted the McGurk Institute — and the Director of McGurk
Institute — to have the credit for capturing influenza, then it
simply could not be possible that Rockefeller was ahead of
them. He also said weighty things about phage. Its essential
nature, he pointed out, was an academic question.

But Martin was by now too much of a scientific dialectician
for Holabird, who gave up and retired to his den (or so Martin
gloomily believed) to devise new ways of plaguing him. For a
time Martin was again left free to wallow in work.

He found a means of reproducing phage on dead bacteria by
a very complicated, very delicate use of partial oxygen-carbon
dioxide tension — as exquisite as cameo-carving, as improbable
as weighing the stars. His report stirred the laboratory world,
and nere and there (in Tokio, in Amsterdam, in Winnemac) en-
thusiasts believed he had proven that phage was a living organ-
ism; and other enthusiasts said, in esoteric language with
mathematical formulae, that he was a liar and six kinds of a
fool.

It was at this time, when he might have become a Great Man,
that he pitched over most of his own work and some of the
duties of being Joyce's husband to follow Terry Wickett,
which showed that he lacked common sense, because Terry
was still an assistant while he himself was head of a department.

Terry had discovered that certain quinine derivatives when
introduced into the animal body slowly decompose into prod-
ucts which are highly toxic to bacteria but only mildly toxic
to the body. There was hinted here a whole new world of
therapy. Terry explained it to Martin, and invited him to
collaborate. Buoyant with great things they got leave from
Holabird — and from Joyce — and though it was winter they
went off to Birdies' Rest, in the Vermont hills. While they
snowshoed and shot rabbits, and all the long dark evenings
while they lay on their bellies before the fire, they ranted
and planned.

Martin had not been so long silk-wrapped that he could not
enjoy gobbling salt pork after the northwest wind and the
snow. It was not unpleasant to be free of thinking up new
compliments for Joyce.

They had, they saw, to answer an interesting question: Do
the quinine derivatives act by attaching themselves to the

433

bacteria, or by changing the body fluids? It was a simple,
clear, definite question which required for answer only the in-
most knowledge of chemistry and biology, a few hundred ani-
mals on which to experiment, and perhaps ten or twenty or a
millon years of trying and failing.

They decided to work with the pneumococcus, and with
the animal which should most nearly reproduce human pneu-
monia. This meant the monkey, and to murder monkeys is
expensive and rather grim. Holabird, as Director, could supply
them, but if they took him into confidence he would demand
immediate results.

Terry meditated, " 'Member there was one of these Nobel-
prize winners, Slim, one of these plumb fanatics that instead
of blowing in the prize spent the whole thing on chimps and
other apes, and he got together with another of those whiskery
old birds, and they ducked up alleys and kept the anti-viv
folks from prosecuting them, and settled the problem of the
transfer of syphilis to lower animals? But we haven't got any
Nobel Prize, I grieve to tell you, and it doesn't look to me — "

"Terry, I'll do it, if necessary! I've never sponged on Joyce
yet, but I will now, if the Holy Wren holds out on us."

ii

They faced Holabird in his office, sulkily, rather childishly,
and they demanded the expenditure of at least ten thousand
dollars for monkeys. They wished to start a research which
might take two years without apparent results— possibly with-
out any results. Terry was to be transferred to Martin's depart-
ment as co-head, their combined salaries shared equally.

Then they prepared to fight.

Holabird stared, assembled his mustache, departed from his
Diligent Director manner, and spoke:

"Wait a minute, if you don't mind. As I gather it, you are
explaining to me that occasionally it's necessary to take some
time to elaborate an experiment. I really must tell you that
I was formerly a researcher in an Institute called McGurk,
and learned several of these things all by myself! Hell, Terry,
and you, Mart, don't be so egotistic! You're not the only scien-
tists who like to work undisturbed! If you poor fish only knew

434

how I long to get away from signing letters and get my fingers
on a kymograph drum again! Those beautiful long hours of
search for truth! And if you knew how I've fought the Trustees
for the chance to keep you fellows free! All right. You shall
have your monkeys. Fix up the joint department to suit your-
selves. And work ahead as seems best. I doubt if in the whole
scientific world there's two people that can be trusted as much as
you two surly birds!"

Holabird rose, straight and handsome and cordial, his hand
out. They sheepishly shook it and sneaked away, Terry grum-
bling, "He's spoiled my whole day! I haven't got a single thing
to kick about! Slim, where's the catch? You can bet there is
one — there always is!"

In a year of divine work, the catch did not appear. They
had their monkeys, their laboratories and garcons, and their
ever known, and decidedly the most nerve-jabbing. Monkeys
unbroken leisure; they began the most exciting work they had
are unreasonable animals; they delight in developing tubercu-
losis on no provocation whatever; in captivity they have a liking
for epidemics; and they make scenes by cursing at their masters
in seven dialects.

"They're so up-and-coming," sighed Terry. "I feel like lettin'
'em go and retiring to Birdies' Rest to grow potatoes. Why
should we murder live-wires like them to save pasty-faced, big-
bellied humans from pneumonia?"

Their first task was to determine with accuracy the tolerated
dose of the quinine derivative, and to study its effects on the
hearing and vision, and on the kidneys, as shown by endless
determinations of blood sugar and blood urea. While Martin
did the injections and observed the effect on the monkeys and
lost himself in chemistry, Terry toiled (all night, all next day,
then a drink and a frowsy nap and all night again) on new
methods of synthesizing the quinine derivative.

This was the most difficult period of Martin's life. To work,
staggering sleepy, all night, to drowse on a bare table at dawn
and to breakfast at a greasy lunch-counter, these were natural
and amusing, but to explain to Joyce why he had missed her
dinner to a lady sculptor and a lawyer whose grandfather had
been a Confederate General, this was impossible. He won a
brief tolerance by explaining that he really had longed to kiss

435

her good-night, that he did appreciate the basket of sandwiches
which she had sent, and that he was about to remove pneumonia
from the human race, a statement which he healthily doubted.

But when he had missed four dinners in succession; when
she had raged, "Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs.
Thorn to be short a man at the last moment?" when she had
wailed, "I didn't so much mind your rudeness on the other
nights, but this evening when I had nothing to do and sat
home alone and waited for you" — then he writhed.

Martin and Terry began to produce pneumonia in their mon-
keys and to treat them, and they had success which caused
them to waltz solemnly down the corridor. They could save
the monkeys from pneumonia invariably, when the infection
had gone but one day, and most of them on the second day
and the third.

Their results were complicated by the fact that a certain
number of the monkeys recovered by themselves, and this they
allowed for by simple-looking figures which took days of stiff,
shoulder-aching sitting over papers . . . one wild-haired col-
larless man at a table, while the other walked among stinking
cages of monkeys, clucking to them, calling them Bess and
Rover, and grunting placidly, "Oh, you would bite me, would
you, sweetheart!" and all the while, kindly but merciless as
the gods, injecting them with the deadly pneumonia.

They came into a high upland where the air was thin with
failures. They studied in the test-tube the break-down products
of pneumococci — and failed. They constructed artificial body
fluids (carefully, painfully, inadequately), they tried the effect
of the derivative on germs in this artificial blood — and failed.

Then Holabird heard of their previous success, and came
down on them with laurels and fury.

He understood, he said, that they had a cure for pneumonia.
Very well! The Institute could do with' the credit for curing
that undesirable disease, and Terry and Martin would kindly
publish their findings (mentioning McGurk) at once.

"We will not! Look here, Holabird!" snarled Terry, "I
thought you were going to let us alone!"

"I have! Nearly a year! Till you should complete your re-
search. And now you've completed it. It's time to let the world
know what you're doing."

436

"If I did, the world would know a doggone sight more'n I
do! Nothing doing, Chief. Maybe we can publish in a year
from now."

"You'll publish now or — "

"All right, Holy. The blessed moment has arrived. I quit!
And I'm so gentlemanly that I do it without telling you what
I think of you!"

Thus was Terry Wickett discharged from McGurk. He
patented the process of synthesizing his quinine derivative and
retired to Birdies' Rest, to build a laboratory out of his small
savings and spend a life of independent research supported by
a restricted sale of sera and of his drug.

For Terry, wifeless and valetless, this was easy enough, but
for Martin it was not simple.

in

Martin assumed that he would resign. He explained it tu
Joyce. How he was to combine a town house and a Greenwich
castle with flannel-shirt collaboration at Birdies' Rest he had
not quite planned, but he was not going to be disloyal.

"Can you beat it! The Holy Wren fires Terry but doesn't
dare touch me! I waited simply because I wanted to watch
Holabird figure out what I'd do. And now — "

He was elucidating it to her in their — in her — car, on the
way home from a dinner at which he had been so gaily charm-
ing to an important dowager that Joyce had crooned, "What
a fool Latham Ireland was to say he couldn't be polite!"

"I'm free, by thunder at last I'm free, because I've worked
up to something that's worth being free for!" he exulted.

She laid her fine hand on his, and begged, "Wait! I want
to think. Please! Do be quiet a moment."

Then: "Mart, if you went on working with Mr. Wickett,
you'd have to be leaving me constantly."

"Well—"

"I really don't think that would be quite nice — I mean espe-
cially now, because I fancy I'm going to have a baby."

He made a sound of surprise.

"Oh, I'm not going to do the weeping mother. And I don't
know whether I'm glad or furious, though I do believe I'd like

437

to have one baby. But it does complicate things, you know.
And personally, I should be sorry if you left the Institute,
which gives you a solid position, for a hole-and-corner existence.
Dear, I have been fairly nice, haven't I? I really do like you,
you know! I don't want you to desert me, and you would if
you went of! to this horrid Vermont place."

"Couldn't we get a little house near there, and spend part
of the year?"

"Pos-sibly. But we ought to wait till this beastly job of
bearing a Dear Little One is over, then think about it."

Martin did not resign from the Institute, and Joyce did not
think about taking a house near Birdies' Rest to the extent of
doing it.

438

CHAPTER XXXIX

WITH Terry Wickett gone, Martin returned to phage.
He made a false start and did the worst work of
his life. He had lost his fierce serenity. He was too
conscious of the ordeal of a professional social life, and he could
never understand that esoteric phenomenon, the dinner-party —
the painful entertainment of people whom one neither likes
nor finds interesting.

So long as he had had a refuge in talking to Terry, he had not
been too irritated by well-dressed nonentities, and for a time
he had enjoyed the dramatic game of making Nice People accept
him. Now he was disturbed by reason.

Clif Clawson showed him how tangled his life had grown.

When he had first come to New York, Martin had looked
for Clif, whose boisterousness had been his comfort among
Angus Duers and Irving Watterses in medical school. Clif was
not to be found, neither at the motor agency for which he had
once worked nor elsewhere on Automobile Row. For fourteen
years Martin had not seen him.

Then to his laboratory at McGurk was brought a black-anoV
red card:

Clifford L. Clawson
(Clif)

TOP NOTCH GUARANTEED OIL INVESTMENTS

Higham BIoc\
Butte

"Clif! Good old Clif! The best friend a man ever had! That
time he lent me the money to get to Leora! Old Clif! By golly

439

I need somebody like him, with Terry out of it and all these
tea-hounds around me!" exulted Martin.

He dashed out and stopped abruptly, staring at a man who
was, not softly, remarking to the girl reception-clerk:

"Well, sister, you scientific birds certainly do lay on the
agony! Never struck a sweller layout than you got here, except
in crook investment-offices — and I've never seen a nicer cutie
than you anywhere. How 'bout lil dinner one of these beauteous
evenings? I expect I'll parley-vous with thou full often now —
I'm a great friend of Doc Arrowsmith. Fact I'm a doc myself —
honest — real sawbones — went to medic school and everything.
Ah! Here's the boy!"

Martin had not allowed for the changes of fourteen years.
He was dismayed.

Clif Clawson, at forty, was gross. His face was sweaty, and
puffy with pale flesh; his voice was raw; he fancied checked
Norfolk jackets, tight across his swollen shoulders and his
beefy hips.

He bellowed, while he belabored Martin's back:

"Well, well, well, well, well, well! Old Mart! Why, you old
son of a gun! Why, you old son of a gun! Why, you damn'
old chicken-thief! Say you skinny little runt, I'm a son of a gun
if you look one day older'n when I saw you last in Zenith!"

Martin was aware of the bright leering of the once humble
reception-clerk. He said, "Well, gosh, it certainly is good to
see you," and hastened to get Clif into the privacy of his office.

"You look fine," he lied, when they were safe. "What you
been doing with yourself? Leora and I did our best to look
you up, when we first came to New York. Uh — Do you
know about, uh, about her?"

CiYuh, I read about her passing away. Fierce luck. And about
your swell work in the West Indies — where was it? I guess
you're a great man now — famous plague-chaser and all that
stuff, and world-renowned skee-entist. I donk suppose you re-
member your old friends now."

"Oh, don't be a chump! It's — it's — it's fine to see you."

"Well, I'm glad to observe you haven't got the capitus en-
largatus, Mart. Golly, I says to meself says I, if I blew in
and old Mart high-hatted me, I'd just about come nigh unto
letting him hear the straight truth, after all the compliments

440

he's been getting from the sassiety dames. I'm glad you've kept
your head. I thought about writing you from Butte — been
selling some bum oil-stock there and kind of got out quick
to save the inspectors the trouble of looking over my books.
'Well,' I thought, 'I'll just sit down and write the whey-faced
runt a letter, and make him feel good by telling him how
tickled I am over his nice work.' But you know how it is —
time kind of slips by. Well, this is excellentus! We'll have a
chance to see a whole lot of each other now. I'm going in with
a fellow on an investment stunt here in New York. Great
pickings, old kid! I'll take you out and show you how to
order a real feed, one of these days. Well, tell me what you
been doing since you got back from the West Indies. I suppose
you're laying your plans to try and get in as the boss or president
or whatever they call it of this gecelebrated Institute."

"No — I, uh, well, I shouldn't much care to be Director. I
prefer sticking to my lab. I — Perhaps you'd like to hear about
my work on phage."

Rejoicing to discover something of which he could talk,
Martin sketched his experiments.

Clif spanked his forehead with a spongy hand and shouted:

"Wait! Say, I've got an idea — and you can come right in
on it. As I apperceive it, the dear old Gen. Public is just
beginning to hear about this bac — what is it? — bacteriophage
junk. Look here! Remember that old scoundrel Benoni Carr,
that I introduced as a great pharmacologist at the medical
banquet? Had din-din with him last eventide. He's running a
sanitarium out on Long Island — slick idea, too — practically he's
a bootlegger; gets a lot of high-rollers out there and let's 'em
have all the hooch they want, on prescriptions, absolutely
legal and water-tight! The parties they throw at that joint,
dames and everything! Believe me, Uncle Clif is sore stricken
with tootelus bootelus and is going to the Carr Sanitarium for
what ails him! But now look: Suppose we got him or some-
body to rig up a new kind of cure — call it phageotherapy —
oh, it takes Uncle Clif to invent the names that claw in the
bounteous dollars! Patients sit in a steam cabinet and eat
tablets made of phage, with just a little strychnin to jazz up
their hearts! Bran-new! Million in it! What-cha-think?"

441

Martin was almost feeble. "No. I'm afraid I'm against it."

"Why?"

"Well, I — Honestly, Clif, if you don't understand it, I
don't know how I can explain the scientific attitude to you.
You know — that's what Gottlieb used to call it — scientific atti-
tude. And as I'm a scientist — least I hope I am — I couldn't —
Well, to be associated with a thing like that — "

"But, you poor louse, don't you suppose I understand the
scientific attitude? Gosh, I've seen a dissecting-room myself!
Why, you poor crab, of course I wouldn't expect you to have
your name associated with it! You'd keep in the background
and slip us all the dope, and get a lot of publicity for phage
in general so the Dee-ah People would fall easier, and we'd
pull all the strong-arm work."

"But — I hope you're joking, Clif. If you weren't joking, I'd
tell you that if anybody tried to pull a thing like that, I'd expose
'em and get 'em sent to jail, no matter who they were!"

"Well, gosh, if you feel that way about it — !"

Clif was peering over the fatty pads beneath his eyes. He
sounded doubtful:

"I suppose you have the right to keep other guys from grab-
bing your own stuff. Well, all right, Mart. Got to be telod-
deling. Tell you what you might do, though, if that don't
hurt your tender conscience, too: you might invite old Clif up
t' the house for dinner, to meet the new lil wifey that I read
about in the sassiety journals. You might happen to remember,
old bean, that there have been times when you were glad
enough to let poor fat old Clif slip you a feed and a place to
sleep!"

"Oh, I know. You bet there have! Nobody was ever decenter
to me; nobody. Look. Where you staying? I'll find out from
my wife what dates we have ahead, and telephone you tomorrow
morning."

"So you let the Old Woman keep the work-sheet for you,
huh? Well, I never butt into anybody's business. I'm staying
at the Berrington Hotel, room 617 — 'member that, 617 — and
you might try and 'phone me before ten tomorrow. Say, that's
one grand sweet song of a cutie you got on the door here.
What cha think? How's chances on dragging her out to feed
and shake a hoof with Uncle Clif?"

442

As primly as the oldest, most staid scientist in the Institute,
Martin protested, "Oh, she belongs to very nice family. I don't
think I should try it. Really, I'd rather you didn't."

Clif's gaze was sharp, for all its fattiness.

With excessive cordiality, with excessive applause when Clif
remarked, "You better go back to work and put some salt on
a coupla bacteria's tails," Martin guided him to the reception-
room, safely past the girl clerk, and to the elevator.

For a long time he sat in his office and was thoroughly
wretched.

He had for years pictured Clif Clawson as another Terry
Wickett. He saw that Clif was as different from Terry as from
Rippleton Holabird. Terry was rough, he was surly, he was col-
loquial, he despised many fine and gracious things, he offended
many fine and gracious people, but these acerbities made up
the haircloth robe wherewith he defended a devotion to such
holy work as no cowled monk ever knew. But Clif —

"I'd do the world a service by killing that man!" Martin
fretted. "Phageotherapy at a yegg sanitarium! I stand him
only because I'm too much of a coward to risk his going around
saying that 'in the days of my Success, I've gone back on my
old friends.' (Success! Puddling at work! Dinners! Talking
to idiotic women! Being furious because you weren't invited
to the dinner to the Portuguese minister!) No. I'll 'phone Clif
we can't have him at the house."

Over him came remembrance of Clif's loyalty in the old
barren days, and Clif's joy to share with him every pathetic
gam.

"Why should he understand my feeling about phage? Was
his scheme any worse than plenty of reputable drug-firms?
How much was I righteously offended, and how much was I
sore because he didn't recognize the high social position of the
rich Dr. Arrowsmith?"

He gave up the question, went home, explained almost
frankly to Joyce what her probable opinion of Clif would be,
and contrived that Clif should be invited to dinner with only
the two of them.

"My dear Mart," said Joyce, "why do you insult me by
hinting that I'm such a snob that I'll be offended by racy slang
and by business ethics very much like those of dear Roger's

443

grandpapa? Do you think I've never ventured out of the draw-
ing-room? I thought you'd seen me outside it! I shall probably
like your Clawson person very much indeed."

The day after Martin had invited him to dinner, Clif tele-
phoned to Joyce:

"This Mrs. Arrowsmith? Well, say, this is old Clif."

:Tm afraid I didn't quite catch it."

"Clif! Old Clif!"

"I'm frightfully sorry but — Perhaps there's a bad connection."

"Why, it's Mr. Clawson, that's going to feed with you on — "

"Oh, of course. I am so sorry."

"Well, look: What I wanted to know is: Is this going to be
just a homey grub-grabbing or a real soiree? In other words,
honey, shall I dress natural or do I put on the soup-and-fish ?
Oh, I got 'em — swallow-tail and the whole darn' outfit!"

"I — Do you mean — Oh. Shall you dress for dinner? I think
perhaps I would."

"Attaboy! I'll be there, dolled up like a new saloon. I'll show
you folks the cutest lil line of jeweled studs you ever laid eyes
on. Well, it's been a great pleezhure to meet Mart's Missus,
and we will now close with singing 'Till We Meet Again' or
'Au Reservoir.' "

When Martin came home, Joyce faced him with, "Sweet, I
can't do it! The man must be mad. Really, dear, you just take
care of him and let me go to bed. Besides: you two won't
want me — you'll want to talk over old times, and I'd only inter-
fere. And with baby coming in two months now, I ought to
go to bed early."

"Oh, Joy, Clif'd be awfully offended, and he's always been
so decent to me and — And you've often asked me about my
cub days. Don't you want," plaintively, "to hear about 'em?"

"Very well, dear. I'll try to be a little sunbeam to him, but
I warn you I sha'n't be a success."

They worked themselves up to a belief that Clif would be
raucous, would drink too much, and slap Joyce on the back.
But when he appeared for dinner he was agonizingly polite and
flowery — till he became slightly drunk. When Martin said
"damn," Clif reproved him with, "Of course I'm op'y a hick,
but I don't think a lady like the Princess here would like you
to cuss."

444

And, "Well, I never expected a rube like young Mart to
marry the real bon-ton article."

And, "Oh, maybe it didn't cost something to furnish this
dining-room, oh, not a-tall!"

And, "Champagne, heh? Well, you're certainly doing poor
old Clif proud. Your Majesty, just tell your High Dingbat to
tell his valay to tell my secretary the address of your bootlegger,
will you?"

In his cups, though he severely retained his moral and elegant
vocabulary, Clif chronicled the jest of selling oil-wells unpro-
vided with oil and of escaping before the law closed in; the
cleverness of joining churches for the purpose of selling stock
to the members; and the edifying experience of assisting Dr.
Benoni Carr to capture a rich and senile widow for his sani-
tarium by promising to provide medical consultation from the
spirit-world.

Joyce was silent through it all, and so superbly polite that
everyone was wretched.

Martin struggled to make a liaison between them, and he
had no elevating remarks about the strangeness of a man's
boasting of his own crookedness, but he was coldly furious
when Clif blundered:

"You said old Gottlieb was sort of down on his luck now."

"Yes, he's not very well."

"Poor old coot. But I guess you've realized by now how
foolish you were when you used to fall for him like seven
and a half brick. Honestly, Lady Arrowsmith, this kid used to
think Pa Gottlieb was the cat's pajamas — begging your pardon
for the slanguageness."

"What do you mean?" said Martin.

"Oh, I'm onto Gottlieb! Of course you know as well as 1
do that he always was a self-advertiser, getting himself talked
about by confidin' to the whole ops terrara what a strict scien-
tist he was, and putting on a lot of dog and emitting these wise
cracks about philosophy and what fierce guys the regular docs
were. But what's worse than — Out in San Diego I ran onto
a fellow that used to be an instructor in botany in Winnemac,
and he told me that with all this antibody stuff of his, Gottlieb
never gave any credit to — well, he was some Russian that did
most of it before and Pa Gottlieb stole all his stuff."

445

That in this charge against Gottlieb there was a hint of truth,
that he knew the great god to have been at times ungenerous,
merely increased the rage which was clenching Martin's fist in
his lap.

Three years before, he would have thrown something, but he
was an adaptable person. He had yielded to Joyce's training in
being quietly instead of noisily disagreeable; and his only com-
ment was "No, I think you're wrong, Clif. Gottlieb has carried
the antibody work 'way beyond all the others."

Before the cofifee and liqueurs had come into the drawing-
room, Joyce begged, at her prettiest, "Mr. Clawson, do you mind
awfully if I slip up to bed? I'm so frightfully glad to have had
the opportunity of meeting one of my husband's oldest friends,
but I'm not feeling very well, and I do think I'd be wise to have
some rest."

"Madam the Princess, I noticed you were looking peeked."

"Oh! Well— Good-night!"

Martin and Clif settled in large chairs in the drawing-room,
and tried to play at being old friends happy in meeting. They
did not look at each other.

After Clif had cursed a little and told three sound smutty
stories, to show that he had not been spoiled and that he had
been elegant only to delight Joyce, he flung:

"Huh! So that is that, as the Englishers remark. Well, I could
A-ee your Old Lady didn't cotton to me. She was just as chummy
as an iceberg. But gosh, I don't mind. She's going to have a kid,
and of course women, all of 'em, get cranky when they're that
way. But — "

He hiccuped, looked sage, and bolted his fifth cognac.

"But what I never could figure out — Mind you, I'm not criti-
cizing the Old Lady. She's as swell as they make 'em. But what
I can't understand is how after living with Leora, who was the
real thing, you can stand a hoity-toity skirt like Joycey!"

Then Martin broke.

The misery of not being able to work, these months since
Terry had gone, had gnawed at him.

"Look here, Clif. I won't have you discuss my wife. I'm sorry
she doesn't please you, but I'm afraid that in this particular

matter-

446

Clif had risen, not too steadily, though his voice and his eyes
were resolute.

"All right. I figured out you were going to high- hat me. Of
course I haven't got a rich wife to slip me money. I'm just a
plain old hobo. I don't belong in a place like this. Not smooth
enough to be a butler. You are. All right. I wish you luck. And
meanwhile you can go plumb to hell, my young friend!"

Martin did not pursue him into the hall.

As he sat alone he groaned, "Thank Heaven, that operation's
over!"

He told himself that Clif was a crook, a fool, and a fat waster;
he told himself that Clif was a cynic without wisdom, a drunk-
ard without charm, and a philanthropist who was generous only
because it larded his vanity. But these admirable truths did not
keep the operation from hurting any more than it would have
eased the removal of an appendix to be told that it was a bad
appendix, an appendix without delicacy or value.

He had loved Clif — did love him and always would. But he
would never see him again. Never!

The impertinence of that flabby blackguard to sneer at Gott-
lieb! His boorishness! Life was too short for —

"But hang it — yes, Clif is a tough, but so am I. He's a crook,
but wasn't I a crook to fake my plague figures in St. Hubert —
and the worse crook because I got praise for it?"

He bobbed up to Joyce's room. She was lying in her immense
four-poster, reading "Peter Whiffle."

"Darling, it was all rather dreadful, wasn't it!" she said. "He's
gone?"

"Yes. . . . He's gone. . . . I've driven out the best friend I
ever had — practically. I let him go, let him go of! feeling that he
was a rotter and a failure. It would have been decenter to have
killed him. Oh, why couldn't you have been simple and jolly
with him? You were so confoundedly polite! He was uneasy
and unnatural, and showed up worse than he really is. He's no
tougher than — he's a lot better than the financiers who cover up
their stuff by being suave. . . . Poor devil! I'll bet right now
Clif's tramping in the rain, saying, 'The one man I ever loved
and tried to do things for has turned against me, now he's — now
he has a lovely wife. What's the use of ever being decent?' he's

447

saying. . . . Why couldn't you be simple and chuck your high-
falutin' manners for once?"

"See here! You disliked him quite as much as I did, and I
will not have you blame it on me! You've grown beyond him.
You that are always blaring about Facts — can't you face the fact?
For once, at least, it's not my fault. You may perhaps remember,
my king of men, that I had the good sense to suggest that I
shouldn't appear tonight; not meet him at all."

"Oh — well — yes — gosh — but — Oh, I suppose so. Well, any-
way— It's over, and that's all there is to it."

"Darling, I do understand how you feel. But isn't it good it is
over! Kiss me good-night."

"But" — Martin said to himself, as he sat feeling naked and
lost and homeless, in the dressing-gown of gold dragon-flies on
black silk which she had bought for him in Paris — "but if it'd
been Leora instead of Joyce — Leora would've known Clif was
a crook, and she'd've accepted it as a fact. (Talk about your
facing facts!) She wouldn't' ve insisted on sitting as a judge. She
wouldn't've said, 'This is different from me, so it's wrong.'
She'd've said, This is different from me, so it's interesting.'
Leora-"

He had a sharp, terrifying vision of her, lying there cofnnless,
below the mold in a garden on the Penrith Hills.

He came out of it to growl, "What was it Clif said? 'You're
not her husband — you're her butler — you're too smooth.' He was
right! The whole point is: I'm not allowed to see who I want to.
I've been so clever that I've made myself the slave of Joyce and
Holy Holabird."

He was always going to, but he never did see Clif Clawson
again.

ii

It happened that both Joyce's and Martin's paternal grand-
fathers had been named John, and John Arrowsmith they called
their son. They did not know it, but a certain John Arrowsmith,
mariner of Bideford, had died in the matter of the Spanish
Armada, taking with him five valorous Dons.

Joyce suffered horribly, and renewed all of Martin's love for
her (he did love pitifully this slim, brilliant girl).

"Death's a better game than bridge — you have no partner to

448

help you!" she said, when she was grotesquely stretched on a
chair of torture and indignity; when before they would give her
the anesthetic, her face was green with agony.

John Arrowsmith was straight of back and straight of limb —
ten good pounds he weighed at birth — and he was gay of eye
when he had ceased to be a raw wrinkled grub and become a
man-child. Joyce worshiped him, and Martin was afraid of him,
because he saw that this minuscule aristocrat, this child born to
the self-approval of riches, would some day condescend to him.

Three months after child-bearing, Joyce was more brisk than
ever about putting and back-hand service and hats and Russian
emigres.

in

For science Joyce had great respect and no understanding.
Often she asked Martin to explain his work, but when he was
glowing, making diagrams with his thumb-nail on the table-
cloth, she would interrupt him with a gracious "Darling — do
you mind — just a second — Plinder, isn't there any more of the
sherry?"

When she turned back to him, though her eyes were kind his
enthusiasm was gone.

She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes,
and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never
sat back watching for silent hours.

Suddenly, in his bogged floundering in the laboratory, he
touched solid earth. He blundered into the effect of phage on
the mutation of bacterial species — very beautiful, very delicate —
and after plodding months when he had been a sane citizen, an
almost good husband, an excellent bridge-player, and a rotten
workman, he knew again the happiness of high taut insanity.

He wanted to work nights, every night. During his uninspired
fumbling, there had been nothing to hold him at the Institute
after five, and Joyce had become used to having him flee to her.
Now he showed an inconvenient ability to ignore engagements,
to snap at delightful guests who asked him to explain all about
science, to forget even her and the baby.

"I've got to work evenings!" he said. "I can't be regular and
easy about it when I'm caught by a big experiment, any more

449

than you could be regular and easy and polite when you were
gestating the baby."

"I know but — Darling, you get so nervous when you're work-
ing like this. Heavens, I don't care how much you offend people
by missing engagements — well, after all, I wish you wouldn't,
but I do know it may be unavoidable. But when you make your-
self so drawn and trembly, are you gaining time in the long
run? It's just for your own sake. Oh, I have it! Wait! You'll see
what a scientist I am! No, I won't explain — not yet!"

Joyce had wealth and energy. A week later, flushed, slim, gal-
lant, joyous, she said to him after dinner, "I've got a surprise
for you!"

She led him to the unoccupied rooms over the garage, behind
their house. In that week, using a score of workmen from the
most immaculate and elaborate scientific supply-house in the
country, she had created for him the best bacteriological labora-
tory he had ever seen — white-tile floor and enameled brick walls,
ice-box and incubator, glassware and stains and microscope, a
perfect constant-temperature bath — and a technician, trained in
Lister and Rockefeller, who had his bedroom behind the labora-
tory and who announced his readiness to serve Dr. Arrowsmith
day or night.

"There!" sang Joyce. "Now when you simply must work
evenings, you won't have to go clear down to Liberty Street.
You can duplicate your cultures, or whatever you call 'em. If
you're bored at dinner — all right! You can slip out here after-
ward and work as late as ever you want. Is — Sweet, is it all
right ? Have I done it right ? I tried so hard — I got the best men
I could—"

While his lips were against hers he brooded, "To have done
this for me! And to be so humble! . . . And now, curse it, I'll
never be able to get away by myself!"

She so joyfully demanded his finding some fault that, to give
her the novel pleasure of being meek, he suggested that the
centrifuge was inadequate.

"You wait, my man!" she crowed.

Two evenings after, when they had returned from the opera,
she led him to the cement-floored garage beneath his new lab-
oratory, and in a corner, ready to be set up, was a second-hand
but adequate centrifuge, a most adequate centrifuge, the master-

450

piece of the great firm of Berkeley-Saunders — in fact none other
than Gladys, whose dismissal from McGurk for her sluttish
ways had stirred Martin and Terry to go out and get bountifully
drunk.

It was less easy for him, this time, to be grateful, but he
worked at it.

IV

Through both the economico-literary and the Rolls-Royce sec-
tions of Joyce's set the rumor panted that there was a new diver-
sion in an exhausted world — going out to Martin's laboratory
and watching him work, and being ever so silent and reverent,
except perhaps when Joyce murmured, "Isn't he adorable the
way he teaches his darling bacteria to say 'Pretty Polly'!" or
when Latham Ireland convulsed them by arguing that scientists
had no sense of humor, or Sammy de Lembre burst out in his
marvelous burlesque of jazz:

Oh, Mistah Bac\-sil-lil-us , don't you gri-in at me;
You mi-cro-bi-o-log-ic cuss, I'm o-on-to thee.
When Mr. Dr. Arrowsmith's done looked at de clues,
You'll sit in jail a-singin dem Bac-ter-i-uh Blues.

Joyce's cousin from Georgia sparkled, "Mart is so cute with
all those lil vases of his. But Ah can always get him so mad by
tellin' him the trouble with him is, he don't go to church often
enough!"

While Martin sought to concentrate.

They flocked from the house to his laboratory only once a
week, which was certainly not enough to disturb a resolute man
— merely enough to keep him constantly waiting for them.

When he sedately tried to explain this and that to Joyce, she
said, "Did we bother you this evening? But they do admire
you so."

He remarked, "Well," and went to bed.

R. A. Hopburn, the eminent patent-lawyer, as he drove away
from the Arrowsmith-Lanyon mansion grunted at his wife:
"I don't mind a host throwing the port at you, if he thinks

451

you're a chump, but I do mind his being bored at your daring
to express any opinion whatever. . . . Didn't he look silly, out
in his idiotic laboratory! . . . How the deuce do you suppose
Joyce ever came to marry him?"

"I can't imagine."

"I can only think of one reason. Of course she may — "

"Now please don't be filthy!"

"Well, anyway — She who might have picked any number of
well-bred, agreeable, intelligent chaps — and I mean intelligent,
because this Arrowsmith person may know all about germs, but
he doesn't know a symphony from a savory. ... I don't think
I'm too fussy, but I don't quite see why we should go to a house
where the host apparently enjoys flatly contradicting you. . . .
Poor devil, I'm really sorry for him; probably he doesn't even
know when he's being rude."

"No. Perhaps. What hurts is to think of old Roger — so gay, so
strong, real Skull and Bones — and to have this abrupt Outsider
from the tall grass sitting in his chair, failing to appreciate his
Pol Roger — What Joyce ever saw in him! Though he does have
nice eyes and such funny strong hands — "

VI

Joyce's busyness was on his nerves. Why she was so busy it
was hard to ascertain; she had an excellent housekeeper, a noble
butler, and two nurses for the baby. But she often said that she
was never allowed to attain her one ambition: to sit and read.

Terry had once called her The Arranger, and though Martin
resented it, when he heard the telephone bell he groaned, "Oh,
Lord, there's The Arranger — wants me to come to tea with
some high-minded hen."

When he sought to explain that he must be free from en-
tanglements, she suggested, "Are you such a weak, irresolute,
little man that the only way you can keep concentrated is by
running away? Are you afraid of the big men who can do big
work, and still stop and play?"

He was likely to turn abusive, particularly as to her definition
of Big Men, and when he became hot and vulgar, she turned
grande dame, so that he felt like an impertinent servant and
was the more vulgar.

452

He was afraid of her then. He imagined fleeing to Leora, and
the two of them, frightened little people, comforting each other
and hiding from her in snug corners.

But often enough Joyce was his companion, seeking new
amusements as surprises for him, and in their son they had a
binding pride. He sat watching little John, rejoicing in his
strength.

It was in early winter, after she had royally taken the baby
South for a fortnight, that Martin escaped for a week with Terry
at Birdies' Rest.

He found Terry tired and a little surly, after months of work-
ing absolutely alone. He had constructed beside the home cabin
a shanty for laboratory, and a rough stable for the horses which
he used in the preparation of his sera. Terry did not, as once he
would have, flare into the details of his research, and not till
evening, when they smoked before the rough fireplace of the
cabin, loafing in chairs made of barrels cushioned with elk skin,
could Martin coax him into confidences.

He had been compelled to give up much of his time to mere
housework and the production of the sera which paid his ex-
penses. "If you'd only been with me, I could have accomplished
something." But his quinine derivative research had gone on
solidly, and he did not regret leaving McGurk. He had found it
impossible to work with monkeys; they were too expensive and
too fragile to stand the Vermont winter; but he had contrived
a method of using mice infected with pneumococcus and —

"Oh, what's the use of my telling you this, Slim? You're not
interested, or you'd have been up here at work with me, months
ago. You've chosen between Joyce and me. All right, but you
can't have both."

Martin snarled, "I'm very sorry I intruded on you, Wickett,"
and slammed out of the cabin. Stumbling through the snow,
blundering in darkness against stumps, he knew the agony of
his last hour, the hour of failure.

"I've lost Terry, now (though I won't stand his imperti-
nence!). I've lost everybody, and I've never really had Joyce. I'm
completely alone. And I can only half work! I'm through!
They'll never let me get to work again!"

Suddenly, without arguing it out, he knew that he was not
going to give up.

453

He floundered back to the cabin and burst in, crying, "You
old grouch, we got to stick together!"

Terry was as much moved as he; neither of them was far
from tears; and as they roughly patted each other's shoulders
they growled, "Fine pair of fools, scrapping just because we're
tired!"

"I will come and work with you, somehow!" Martin swore.
"I'll get a six months' leave from the Institute, and have Joyce
stay at some hotel near here, or do something. Gee! Back to real
work. . . . WorJ^l . . . Now tell me: When I come up here,
what d'you say we — "

They talked till dawn.

454

CHAPTER XL

DR. and Mrs. Rippleton Holabird had invited only Joyce
and Martin to dinner. Holabird was his most charming
self. He admired Joyce's pearls, and when the squabs
had been served he turned on Martin with friendly intensity:

"Now will Joyce and you listen to me most particularly?
Things are happening, Martin, and I want you — no, Science
wants you! — to take your proper part in them. I needn't, by the
way, hint that this is absolutely confidential. Dr. Tubbs and his
League of Cultural Agencies are beginning to accomplish mar-
vels, and Colonel Minnigen has been extraordinarily liberal.

"They've gone at the League with exactly the sort of thor-
oughness and taking-it-slow that you and dear old Gottlieb
have always insisted on. For four years now they've stuck to
making plans. I happen to know that Dr. Tubbs and the council
of the League have had the most wonderful conferences with
college-presidents and editors and clubwomen and labor-leaders
(the sound, sensible ones, of course) and efficiency-experts and
the more advanced advertising-men and ministers, and all the
other leaders of public thought.

"They've worked out elaborate charts classifying all intellectual
occupations and interests, with the methods and materials and
tools, and especially the goals — the aims, the ideals, the moral
purposes — that are suited to each of them. Really tremendous!
Why, a musician or an engineer, for example, could look at his
chart and tell accurately whether he was progressing fast enough,
at his age, and if not, just what his trouble was, and the remedy.
With this basis, the League is ready to go to work and encourage
all brain-workers to affiliate.

"McGurk Institute simply must get in on this co-ordination,
which I regard as one of the greatest advances in thinking that

455

has ever been made. We are at last going to make all the erst-
while chaotic spiritual activities of America really conform to
the American ideal; we're going to make them as practical and
supreme as the manufacture of cash-registers! I have certain rea-
sons for supposing I can bring Ross McGurk and Minnigen to-
gether, now that the McGurk and Minnigen lumber interests
have stopped warring, and if so I shall probably quit the Insti-
tute and help Tubbs guide the League of Cultural Agencies.
Then we'll need a new Director of McGurk who will work with
us and help us bring Science out of the monastery to serve
Mankind."

By this time Martin understood everything about the League
except what the League was trying to do.

Holabird went on:

"Now I know, Martin, that you've always rather sneered at
Practicalness, but I have faith in you! I believe you've been too
much under the influence of Wickett, and now that he's gone
and you've seen more of life and of Joyce's set and mine, I
believe I can coax you to take (oh! without in any way neglect-
ing the severities of your lab work!) a broader view.

"I am authorized to appoint an Assistant Director, and I think
I'm safe in saying he would succeed me as full Director. Sholtheis
wants the place, and Dr. Smith and Yeo would leap at it, but
I haven't yet found any of them that are quite Our Own Sort,
and I ofTer it to you! I daresay in a year or two, you will be
Director of McGurk Institute!"

Holabird was uplifted, as one giving royal favor. Mrs. Hola-
bird was intense, as one present on an historical occasion and
Joyce was ecstatic over the honor to her Man.

Martin stammered, "W-why, I'll have to think it over. Sort of
unexpected — "

The rest of the evening Holabird so brimmingly enjoyed him-
self picturing an era in which Tubbs and Martin and he would
rule, co-ordinate, standardize, and make useful the whole world
of intelligence, from trousers-designing to poetry, that he did
not resent Martin's silence. At parting he chanted, "Talk it over
with Joyce, and let me have your decision tomorrow. By the
way, I think we'll get rid of Pearl Robbins; she's been useful
but now she considers herself indispensable. But that's a de-
tail. . . . Oh, I do have faith in you, Martin, dear old boy!

456

You've grown and calmed down, and you've widened your in-
terests so much, this past year!"

In their car, in that moving curtained room under the crystal
dome-light, Joyce beamed at him.

"Isn't it too wonderful, Mart! And I do feel Rippleton can
bring it off. Think of your being Director, head of that whole
great Institute, when just a few years ago you were only a cub
there! But haven't I perhaps helped, just a little?"

Suddenly Martin hated the blue-and-gold velvet of the car,
the cunningly hid gold box of cigarettes, all this soft and smoth-
ering prison. He wanted to be out beside the unseen chauffeur —
His Own Sort! — facing the winter. He tried to look as though
he were meditating, in an awed, appreciative manner, but he
was merely being cowardly, reluctant to begin the slaughter.
Slowly :

"Would you really like to see me Director?"

"Of course! All that — Oh, you know; I don't just mean the
prominence and respect, but the power co accomplish good."

"Would you like to see me dictating letters, giving out inter-
views, buying linoleum, having lunch with distinguished fools,
advising men about whose work I don't know a blame' thing?"

"Oh, don't be so superior! Someone has to do these things.
And that'd be only a small part of it. Think of the opportunity
of encouraging some youngster who wanted a chance to do
splendid science!"

"And give up my own chance?"

"Why need you? You'd be head of your own department just
the same. And even if you did give up — You are so stubborn!
It's lack of imagination. You think that because you've started
in on one tiny branch of mental activity, there's nothing else in
the world. It's just as when I persuaded you that if you got out
of your stinking laboratory once a week or so, and actually bent
your powerful intellect to a game of golf, the world of science
wouldn't immediately stop! No imagination! You're precisely
like these business men yo»_ve always cursing because they can't
see anything in life beyond then soap-factories or their banks!"

"And you really would have me give up my work — "

He saw that with all her eager complaisances she had never
understood what he was up to, had not comprehended one word
about the murderous effect of the directorship on Gottlieb.

457

He was silent again, and before they reached home she said
only, "You know I'm the last person to speak of money, but
really, it's you who have so often brought up the matter of
hating to be dependent on me, and you know as Director you
would make so much more that — Forgive me!"

She fled before him into her palace, into the automatic elevator.

He plodded up the stairs, grumbling, "Yes, it is the first chance
I've had to really contribute to the expenses here. Sure! Willing
to take her money, but not to do anything in return, and then
call it 'devotion to science!' Well, I've got to decide right now — "

He did not go through the turmoil of deciding; he leaped to
decision without it. He marched into Joyce's room, irritated by
its snobbishness of discreet color. He was checked by the miser-
able way in which she sat brooding on the edge of her day
couch, but he flung:

"I'm not going to do it, even if I have to leave the Institute —
and Holabird will just about make me quit. I will not get buried
in this pompous fakery of giving orders and — "

"Mart! Listen! Don't you want your son to be proud of you?'*

"Urn. Well — No, not if he's to be proud of me for being a
stuffed shirt, a sideshow barker — "

"Please don't be vulgar."

"Why not ? Matter of fact, I haven't been vulgar enough lately.
What I ought to do is to go to Birdies' Rest right now, and
work with Terry."

"I wish I had some way of showing you — Oh, for a 'scientist*
you do have the most incredible blind-spots! I wish I could make
you see just how weak and futile that is. The wilds! The simple
life! The old argument. It's just the absurd, cowardly sort of
thing these tired highbrows do that sneak off to some Esoteric
Colony and think they're getting strength to conquer life, when
they're merely running away from it."

"No. Terry has his place in the country only because he can
live cheaper there. If we — if he could afford it, he'd probably
be right here in town, with garqonr and everything, like Mc-
Gurk, but with no Director Holaoird, by God — and no Director
Arrowsmith!"

"Merely a cursing, ill-bred, intensely selfish Director Terry
Wickett!"

"Now, by God, let me tell you — "

458

"Martin, do you need to emphasize your arguments by a 'by
God' in every sentence, or have you a few other expressions in
your highly scientific vocabulary?"

"Well, I have enough vocabulary to express the idea that I'm
thinking of joining Terry."

"Look here, Mart. You feel so virtuous about wanting to go
of! and wear a flannel shirt and be peculiar and very, very pure.
Suppose everybody argued that way. Suppose every father de<
serted his children whenever his nice little soul ached? Just what
would become of the world? Suppose I were poor, and you left
me, and I had to support John by taking in washing — "

"It'd probably be fine for you but fierce on the washing! No!
I beg your pardon. That was an obvious answer. But — I imagine
it's just that argument that's kept almost everybody, all these
centuries, from being anything but a machine for digestion and
propagation and obedience. The answer is that very few ever do,
under any condition, willingly leave a soft bed for a. shanty bunk
in order to be pure, as you very properly call it, and those of us
that are pioneers — Oh, this debate could go on forever! We
could prove that I'm a hero or a fool or a deserter or anything
you like, but the fact is I've suddenly seen I must go! I want
my freedom to work, and I herewith quit whining about it and
grab it. You've been generous to me. I'm grateful. But you've
never been mine. Good-by."

"Darling, darling — We'll talk it over again in the morning,
when you aren't so excited. . . . And an hour ago I was so
proud of you!"

"All right. Good-night."

But before morning, taking two suit-cases and a bag of his
roughest clothes, leaving for her a tender note which was the
hardest thing he had ever written, kissing his son and mutter-
ing, "Come to me when you grow up, old man," he went to a
cheap side-street hotel. As he stretched on the rickety iron bed,
he grieved for their love. Before noon he had gone to the Insti-
tute, resigned, taken certain of his own apparatus and notes and
books and materials, refused to answer a telephone call from
Joyce, and caught a train for Vermont.

Cramped on the red-plush seat of the day-coach (he who of
late had ridden in silken private cars), he grinned with the joy
of no longer having to toil at dinner-parties.

459

He drove up to Birdies' Rest in a bob-sled. Terry was chop-
ping wood, in a mess of chip-littered snow.

"Hello, Terry. Come for keeps."

"Fine, Slim. Say, there's a lot of dishes in the shack need
washing."

ii

. He had become soft. To dress in the cold shanty and to wash
in icy water was agony; -to tramp for three hours through fluffy
snow exhausted him. But the rapture of being allowed to work
twenty-four hours a day without leaving an experiment at its
juiciest moment to creep home for dinner, of plunging with
Terry into arguments as cryptic as theology and furious as the
indignation of a drunken man, carried him along, and he felt
himself growing sinewy. Often he meditated on yielding to
Joyce so far as to allow her to build a better laboratory for them,
and more civilized quarters.

With only one servant, though, or two at the very most, and
just a simple decent bathroom —

She had written, "You have been thoroughly beastly, and any
attempt at reconciliation, if that is possible now, which I rather
doubt, must come from you."

He answered, describing the ringing winter woods and not
mentioning the platform word Reconciliation.

in

They wanted to study further the exact mechanism of the
action of their quinine derivatives. This was difficult with the
mice which Terry had contrived to use instead of monkeys,
because of their size. Martin had brought with him strains of
Bacillus lepisepticus, which causes a pleuro-pneumonia in rabbits,
and their first labor was to discover whether their original com-
pound was effective against this bacillus as well as against pneu-
mococcus. Profanely they found that it was not; profanely and
patiently they trudged into an infinitely complicated search for a
compound that should be.

They earned their living by preparing sera which rather
grudgingly they sold to physicians of whose honesty they were
certain, abruptly refusing the popular drug- vendors. They thus

460

received surprisingly large sums, and among all clever people it
was believed that they were too coyly shrewd to be sincere.

Martin worried as much over what he considered his treachery
to Clif Clawson as over his desertion of Joyce and John, but this
worrying he did only when he could not sleep. Regularly, at
three in the morning, he brought both Joyce and honest Clif to
Birdies' Rest; and regularly, at six, when he was frying bacon,
he forgot them.

Terry the barbarian, once he was free of the tittering and
success-pawing of Holabird, was an easy campmate. Upper berth
or lower was the same to him, and till Martin was hardened to
cold and fatigue, Terry did more than his share of wood-cutting
and supply-toting, and with great melody and skill he washed
their clothes.

He had the genius to see that they two alone, shut up together
season on season, would quarrel. He planned with Martin thai
the laboratory scheme should be extended to include eight (but
never more!) maverick and undomestic researchers like them-
selves, who should contribute to the expenses of the camp by
manufacturing sera, but otherwise do their own independent
work — whether it should be the structure of the atom, or a dis-
proof of the results of Drs. Wickett and Arrowsmith. Two
rebels, a chemist now caught in a drug-firm and a university
professor, were coming next autumn.

"It's kind of a mis'able return to monasteries," grumbled
Terry, "except that we're not trying to solve anything for any-
body but our own fool selves. Mind you! When this place be-
comes a shrine, and a lot of cranks begin to creep in here, then
you and I got to beat it, Slim. We'll move farther back in the
woods, or if we feel too old for that, we'll take another shot at
professorships or Dawson Hunziker or even the Rev. Dr. Hola-
bird."

For the first time Martin's work began definitely to draw
ahead of Terry's.

His mathematics and physical chemistry were now as sound
as Terry's, his indifference to publicity and to flowery hangings
as great, his industry as fanatical, his ingenuity in devising new
apparatus at least comparable, and his imagination far more
swift. He had less ease but more passion. He hurled out hy-
potheses like sparks. He began, incredulously, to comprehend

461

his freedom. He would yet determine the essential nature of
phage; and as he became stronger and surer — and no doubt less
human — he saw ahead of him innumerous inquiries into chemo-
therapy and immunity; enough adventures to keep him busy for
decades.

It seemed to him that this was the first spring he had ever seen
and tasted. He learned to dive into the lake, though the first
plunge was an agony of fiery cold. They fished before breakfast,
they supped at a table under the oaks, they tramped twenty
miles on end, they had bluejays and squirrels for interested
neighbors; and when they had worked all night, they came out
to find serene dawn lifting across the sleeping lake.

Martin felt sun-soaked and deep of chest, and always he
hummed.

And one day he peeped out, beneath his new horn-rimmed
almost-middle-aged glasses, to see a gigantic motor crawling up
their woods road. From the car, jolly and competent in tweeds,
stepped Joyce.

He wanted to flee through the back door of the laboratory
shanty. Reluctantly he edged out to meet her.

"It's a sweet place, really!" she said, and amiably kissed him.
"Let's walk down by the lake."

In a stilly place of ripples and birch boughs, he was moved
to grip her shoulders.

She cried, "Darling, I have missed you! You're wrong about
lots of things, but you're* right about this — you must work and
not be disturbed by a lot of silly people. Do you like my tweeds?
Don't they look wildernessy? You see, I've come to stay! I'll
build a house near here; perhaps right across the lake. Yes. That
will make a sweet place, over there on that sort of little plateau,
if I can get the land — probably some horrid tight-fisted old
farmer owns it. Can't you just see it: a wide low house, with
enormous verandas and red awnings — "

"And visitors coming?"

"I suppose so. Sometimes. Why?"

Desperately, "Joyce, I do love you. I want awfully, just now,
to kiss you properly. But I will not have you bringing a lot of
people — and there'd probably be a rotten noisy motor launch.
Make our lab a joke. Roadhouse. New sensation. Why, Terry

462

would go crazy! You are lovely! But you want a playmate, and
I want to work. I'm afraid you can't stay. No."

"And our son is to be left without your care?"

"He — Would he have my care if I died? . . . He is a nice
kid, too! I hope he won't be a Rich Man! . . . Perhaps ten years
from now he'll come to me here."

"And live like this?"

"Sure — unless I'm broke. Then he won't live so well. We have
meat practically every day now!"

"I see. And suppose your Terry Wickett should marry some
waitress or some incredibly stupid rustic? From what you've
told me, he rather fancies that sort of girl!"

"Well, either he and I would beat her, together, or it would
be the one thing that could break me."

"Martin, aren't you perhaps a little insane?"

"Oh, absolutely! And how I enjoy it! Though you — You
look here now, Joy! We're insane but we're not cranks! Yester-
day an 'esoteric healer' came here because he thought this was
a free colony, and Terry walked him twenty miles, and then I
think he threw him in the lake. No. Gosh. Let me think." He
scratched his chin. "I don't believe we're insane. We're farmers."

"Martin, it's too infinitely diverting to find you becoming a
fanatic, and all the while trying to wriggle out of being a fanatic.
You've left common sense. I am common sense. I believe in
bathing! Good-by!"

"Now you look here. By golly — "

She was gone, reasonable and triumphant.

As the chauffeur maneuvered among the stumps of the clear-
ing, for a moment Joyce looked out from her car, and they
stared at each other, through tears. They had never been so
frank, so pitiful, as in this one unarmored look which recalled
every jest, every tenderness, every twilight they had known
together. But the car rolled on unhalted, and he remembered
that he had been doing an experiment —

IV

On a certain evening of May, Congressman Almus Picker-
baugh was dining with the President of the United States.
"When the campaign is over, Doctor," said the President, "J

463

hope we shall see you a cabinet-member — the first Secretary of
Health and Eugenics in the country!"

That evening, Dr. Rippleton Holabird was addressing a meet-
ing of celebrated thinkers, assembled by the League of Cultural
Agencies. Among the Men of Measured Merriment on the plat-
form were Dr. Aaron Sholtheis, the new Director of McGurk
Institute, and Dr. Angus Duer, head of the Duer Clinic and
professor of surgery in Fort Dearborn Medical College.

Dr. Holabird's epochal address was being broadcast by radio
to a million ardently listening lovers of science.

That evening, Bert Tozer of Wheatsylvania, North Dakota,
was attending mid-week prayer-meeting. His new Buick sedan
awaited him outside, and with modest satisfaction he heard the
minister gloat:

"The righteous, even the Children of Light, they shall be
rewarded with a great reward and their feet shall walk in glad-
ness, sai:h the Lord of Hosts; but the mockers, the Sons of
Belial, they shall be slain betimes and cast down into darkness
and failure, and in the busy marts shall they be forgot."

That evening, Max Gottlieb sat unmoving and alone, in a
dark small room above the banging city street. Only his eyes
were alive.

That evening, the hot breeze languished along the palm-
waving ridge where the ashes of Gustaf Sondelius were lost
among cinders, and a depression in a garden marked the grave
of Leora.

That evening, after an unusually gay dinner with Latham
Ireland, Joyce admitted, "Yes, if I do divorce him, I may marry
you. I know! He's never going to see how egotistical it is to
think he's the only man living who's always right!"

That evening, Martin Arrowsmith and Terry Wickett lolled
in a clumsy boat, an extraordinarily uncomfortable boat, far out
on the water.

"I feel as if I were really beginning to work now," said Martin.
"This new quinine stuff may prove pretty good. We'll plug
along on it for two or three years, and maybe we'll get some-
thing permanent — and probably we'll fail!"

THE END

464

Modern Library of the World's Best Books
COMPLETE LIST OF TITLES IN

THE MODERN LIBRARY

For convenience in ordering use number at right of title

ADAMS, HENRY
AIKEN, CONRAD

AIKEN, CONRAD

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD

ARISTOTLE

ARISTOTLE

BALZAC

BALZAC

BEERBOHM, MAX

BELLAMY, EDWARD

BEMELMANS, LUDWIG

BENNETT, ARNOLD

BERGSON, HENRI

BIERCE, AMBROSE

BOCCACCIO

BRONTE, CHARLOTTE

BRONTE, EMILY

BUCK, PEARL

BURK, JOHN N.

BURTON, RICHARD

BUTLER, SAMUEL

BUTLER, SAMUEL

BYRNE, DONN

CALDWELL, ERSKINE

CALDWELL, ERSKINE

CAN FIELD, DOROTHY

CARROLL, LEWIS

CASANOVA, JACQUES

CELLINI, BENVENUTO

CERVANTES

CHAUCER

COMMAGER, HENRY STEELE

CONFUCIUS

CONRAD, JOSEPH

CONRAD, JOSEPH

The Education of Henry Adams 76
A Comprehensive Anthology of

American Poetry 101
aoth-Century American Poetry 127
Winesburg, Ohio 104
Introduction to Aristotle 248
Politics 228
Droll Stories 193

Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet 24$
Zuleika Dobson 116
Looking Backward 22
My War with the United States 175
The Old Wives' Tale 184
Creative Evolution 231
In the Midst of Life 133
The Decameron 71
Jane Eyre 64
Wuthering Heights 106
The Good Earth 15
The Life and Works of Beethoven 24I
The Arabian Nights 201
Erewhon and Erewhon Revisited 136
The Way of All Flesh 13
Messer Marco Polo 43
God's Little Acre 51
Tobacco Road 249
The Deepening Stream 200
Alice in Wonderland, etc. 79
Memoirs of Casanova 165
Autobiography of Cellini 150
Don Quixote 174
The Canterbury Tales 161
A Short History of the United States 235
The Wisdom of Confucius 7
Heart of Darkness
(In Great Modern Short Stories 168)
Lord Jim 186

CONRAD, JOSEPH
CORNEILLE and RACINE
CORVO, FREDERICK BARON
CRANE, STEPHEN
CUMMINGS, E. E.
DANA, RICHARD HENRY
DANTE

DAY, CLARENCE
DEFOE, DANIEL
DEWEY, JOHN
DICKENS, CHARLES
DICKENS, CHARLES
DICKENS, CHARLES
DINESEN, ISAK
DOS PASSOS, JOHN
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR
DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR
DOUGLAS, NORMAN
DOYLE, SIR ARTHUR CONAN

DREISER, THEODORE
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE
DUMAS. ALEXANDRE
DU MAURIER, DAPHNE
DU MAURIER, GEORGE
EDMAN, IRWIN
EDMAN, IRWIN
ELLIS, HAVELOCK
EMERSON, RALPH WALDO
FAST, HOWARD
FAULKNER, WILLIAM
FAULKNER, WILLIAM

FIELDING, HENRY
FIELDING, HENRY
FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE
FORESTER, C. S.
FORSTER, E. M.
FRANCE, ANATOLE
FRANKLIN, BENJAMIN
FROST, ROBERT
GALSWORTHY, JOHN

GAUTIER, THEOPHILE

GEORGE, HENRY
GLASGOW, ELLEN
GOETHE

Victory 34

Six Plays of Corneille and Racine 194

A History of the Borgias 192

The Red Badge of Courage 130

The Enormous Room 214

Two Years Before the Mast 236

The Divine Comedy 208

Life with Father 230

Moll Flanders 122

Human Nature and Conduct 173

A Tale of Two Cities 189

David Copperfield no

Pickwick Papers 204

Seven Gothic Tales 54

Three Soldiers 205

Crime and Punishment 199

The Brothers Karamazov 151

The Possessed 55

South Wind 5

The Adventures and Memoirs of Sher-
lock Holmes 206

Sister Carrie 8

Camille 69

The Three Musketeers I43

Rebecca 227

Peter Ibbetson 207

The Philosophy of Plato 181

The Philosophy of Santayana 224

The Dance of Life 160

Essays and Other Writings 91

The Unvanquished 239

Sanctuary 61

The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay
Dying 187

Joseph Andrews 117

Tom Jones 185

Madame Bovary 28

The African Queen 102

A Passage to India 218

Penguin Island 210

Autobiography, etc. 39

The Poems of 242

The Apple Tree

(In Great Modern Short Stories 168)

Mile. De Maupin and

One of Cleopatra's Nights 53

Progress and Poverty 36

Barren Ground 25

Fautt 177

GOETHE

GOGOL, NIKOLAI
GRAVES, ROBERT
HAMMETT, DASHIELL
HAMSUN. KNUT
HARDY, THOMAS
HARDY, THOMAS
HARDY, THOMAS
HARDY, THOMAS
HART AND KAUFMAN
HARTE, BRET
HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL
HELLMAN, LILLIAN
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST
HEMINGWAY, ERNEST
HEMON, LOUIS
HENRY, O.
HERSEY, JOHN
HOMER
HOMER
HORACE
HUDSON, W. H.
HUDSON, W. H.
HUGHES, RICHARD
HUGO, VICTOR
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
HUXLEY, ALDOUS
IBSEN, HENRIK
IRVING, WASHINGTON

JAMES, HENRY
JAMES, HENRY
JAMES, HENRY
JAMES, WILLIAM
JAMES, WILLIAM
JEFFERS, ROBINSON

JEFFERSON, THOMAS
JOYCE, JAMES
JOYCE, JAMES

KAUFMAN AND HART
KOESTLER, ARTHUR
KUPRIN, ALEXANDRE
LARDNER, RING
LAWRENCE, D. R
LAWRENCE, D. H.
LAWRENCE, D. YL
LEWIS, SINCLAIR
LEWIS, SINCLAIR
LONGFELLOW, HENRY W.
LOUYS, PIERRE
LUDWIG, EMIL

The Sorrows of Werther

(In Collected German Stories 108)
Dead Souls 40
I, Claudius 20
The Maltese Falcon 45
Growth of the Soil 12
Jude the Obscure 135
The Mayor of Casterbridge 17
The Return of the Native 121
Tess of the D'Urbervilles 72
Six Plays by 233
The Best Stories of 250
The Scarlet Letter 93
Four Plays by 223
A Farewell to Arms 19
The Sun Also Rises 170
Maria Chapdelaine ic
Best Short Stories of 4
A Bell for Adano 16
The Iliad 166
The Odyssey 167
The Complete Works of I4I
Green Mansions 89
The Purple Land 24
A High Wind in Jamaica 112
The Hunchback of Notre Dame 25
Antic Hay 209
Point Counter Point 180
A Doll's House, Ghosts, etc. 6
Selected Writings of Washington Irving

240
The Portrait of a Lady 107
The Turn of the Screw 169
The Wings of the Dove 244
The Philosophy of William James 114
The Varieties of Religious Experience 70
Roan Stallion; Tamar and Other

Poems 118
The Life and Selected Writings of 234
Dubliners 124
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young

Man 145
Six Plays by 233
Darkness at Noon 74
Yama 203

The Collected Short Stories of 211
The Rainbow 128
Sons and Lovers 109
Women in Love 68
Arrowsmith 42
Babbitt 162
Poems 56
Aphrodite 77
Napoleon 95

MACHIAVELLI

MALRAUX, ANDRE
MANN, THOMAS

MANSFIELD, KATHERINE
MARQUAND, JOHN P.
MARX, KARL
MAUGHAM, W. SOMERSET
MAUGHAM, VV. SOMERSET
MAUPASSANT, GUY DE
MAUROIS, ANDRE
McFEE, WILLIAM
MELVILLE, HERMAN
MEREDITH, GEORGE
MEREDITH, GEORGE
MEREJKOWSKI, DMITRI
MILTON, JOHN

MISCELLANEOUS

MOLIERE

MORLEY, CHRISTOPHER
NASH, OGDEN
NEVINS, ALLAN

The Prince and The Discourses of

Machiavelli65
Man's Fate 33
Death in Venice

(In Collected German Stones 108)
The Garden Party 129
The Late George Apley 182
Capital and Other Writings 202
Of Human Bondage 176
The Moon and Sixpence 27
Best Short Stories 98
Disraeli 46

Casuals of the Sea 195
Moby Dick 119
Diana of the Crossways 14
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel 134
The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci 138
The Complete Ppetry and Selected

Prose of John Milton 132
An Anthology of American Negro

Literature 163
An Anthology of Light Verse 48
Best Amer. Humorous Short Stories 87
Best Russian Short Stories, including

Bunin's The Gentleman from San

Francisco 18
Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays 94
Famous Ghost Stories 73
Five Great Modern Irish Plays 30
Four Famous Greek Plays 158
Fourteen Great Detective Stories 144
Great German Short Novels and

Stories 108
Great Modern Short Stories 168
Great Tales of the American West 238
Outline of Abnormal Psychology 152
Outline of Psychoanalysis 66
The Consolation of Philosophy 226
The Federalist 139
The Making of Man: An Outline of

Anthropology I49
The Making of Society: An Outline of

Sociology 183
The Sex Problem in Modern Society 198
The Short Bible 57
Three Famous French Romances 85

Sapho, by Alphonse Daudet

Manon Lescaut, by Antoine Prevost

Carmen, by Prosper Merimee
Plays 78

Parnassus on Wheels 190
The Selected Verse of Ogden Nash 191
A Short History of the United States

235

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH
NOSTRADAMUS
ODETS, CLIFFORD
O'NEILL, EUGENE

O'NEILL, EUGENE

PALGRAVE, FRANCIS
PARKER, DOROTHY
PARKER, DOROTHY
PASCAL, BLAISE
PATER, WALTER
PATER, WALTER
PAUL, ELLIOT

PEARSON, EDMUND

PEPYS, SAMUEL

PERELMAN, S. J.

PETRONIUS ARBITER

PLATO

PLATO

POE, EDGAR ALLAN

POLO, MARCO

PORTER, KATHERINE ANNE

PROUST, MARCEL

PROUST, MARCEL

PROUST, MARCEL

PROUST, MARCEL

PROUST, MARCEL

RAWLINGS, MARJORIE

KINNAN
READE, CHARLES
REED, JOHN
RENAN, ERNEST
ROSTAND, EDMOND
ROUSSEAU, JEAN JACQUES

RUSSELL, BERTRAND
SAROYAN, WILLIAM

SCHOPENHAUER
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM

SHEEAN, VINCENT
SMOLLETT, TOBIAS
SNOW, EDGAR
SPINOZA

STEINBECK, JOHN
STEINBECK, JOHN
STEINBECK, JOHN
STEINBECK, JOHN
STENDHAL

Thus Spake Zarathustra 9

Oracles of 81

Six Plays of 67

The Emperor Jones, Anna Christie and

The Hairy Ape I46
The Long Voyage Home and Seven

Plays of the Sea 11 1
The Golden Treasury 232
The Collected Short Stories of 123
The Collected Poetry of 237
Pensees and The Provincial Letters 164
Marius the Epicurean 90
The Renaissance 86
The Life and Death of a Spanish

Town 225
Studies in Murder 113
Samuel Pepys' Diary 103
The Best of 247
The Satyricon 156
The Philosophy of Plato 181
The Republic 153
Best Tales 82

The Travels of Marco Polo 196
Flowering Judas 88
Cities of the Plain 220
Swann's Way 59
The Captive 120
The Guermantes Way 213
Within a Budding Grove 17a

The Yearling 246

The Cloister and the Hearth 62

Ten Days that Shook the World 215

The Life of Jesus I40

Cyrano de Bergerac 154

The Confessions of Jean Jacques

Rousseau 243
Selected Papers of Bertrand Russell 137
The Daring Young Man on the Flying

Trapeze 92
The Philosophy of Schopenhauer 52
The Complete Tragedies of I
The Complete Comedies of 2
The Complete Histories and Poems o*

Shakespeare 3
Personal History 32
Humphry Clinker 159
Red Star Over China 126
The Philosophy of Spinoza 60
In Dubious Battle 115
Of Mice and Men 29
The Grapes of Wrath I48
Tortilla Flat 216
The Red and the Black 157

STERNE, LAURENC*.
STOKER, BRAM
STONE, IRVING
STRACHEY, LYTTON
SUETONIUS
SWIFT, JONATHAN

SWINBURNE, CHARLES
SYMONDS, JOHN A.
TACITUS

TCHEKOV, ANTON
TCHEKOV, ANTON

THACKERAY, WILLIAM
THACKERAY, WILLIAM
THOMPSON, FRANCIS
THOREAU, HENRY DAVID
THUCYDIDES
TOLSTOY, LEO
TOMLINSON, H. M.
TROLLOPE, ANTHONY
TROLLOPE, ANTHONY
TURGENEV, IVAN-
VAN LOON, HENDRIK W.
VEBLEN, THORSTEIN
VIRGIL'S WORKS

VOLTAIRE
WALPOLE, HUGH
WALTON, IZAAK
WEBB, MARY
WELLS, H. G.
WHARTON, EDITH
WHITMAN, WALT
WILDE, OSCAR
WILDE, OSCAR
WILDE, OSCAR
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
WOOLF, VIRGINIA
WRIGHT, RICHARD
YEATS, W. B.
YOUNG, G. F.
ZOLA, EMILE
ZWEIG, STEFAN

Tristram Shandy I47

Dracula 31

Lust for Life 11

Eminent Victorians 212

Lives of the Twelve Caesars 188

Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, The
Battle of the Books 100

Poems 23

The Life of Michelangelo 49

The Complete Works of 222

Short Stories 50

Sea Gull, Cherry Orchard, Three Sis-
ters, etc. 171

Henry Esmond 80

Vanity Fair 131

Complete Poems 38

Walden and Other Writings 155

The Complete Writings of 58

Anna Karenina 37

The Sea and the Jungle 99

Barchester Towers and The Warden 4I

The Eustace Diamonds 251

Fathers and Sons 21

Ancient Man 105

The Theory of the Leisure Class 63

Including The Aeneid, Eclogues, and
Georgics 75

Candide 47

Fortitude 178

The Compleat Angler 26

Precious Bane 219

Tono Bungay 197

The Age of Innocence 229

Leaves of Grass 97

Dorian Gray, De Profundis 125

Poems and Fairy Tales 84

The Plays of Oscar Wilde 83

Mrs. Dalloway 96

To the Lighthouse 217

Native Son 221

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales 44

The Medici 179

Nana 142

Amok (In Collected German Stories 108)

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Gio. TWELVE FAMOUS RESTORATION PLAYS (1660-1820)

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G25. THE COMPLETE PLAYS OF GILBERT AND SULLIVAN.
G26. MARX, KARL. Capital.
G27. DARWIN, CHARLES. The Origin of Species and The Descent

of Man.
G28. THE COMPLETE WORKS OF LEWIS CARROLL.
G29. PRESCOTT, WILLIAM H. The Conquest of Mexico and

The Conquest of Peru.
G30. MYERS, GUSTAVUS. History of the Great American

Fortunes.

G31. WERFEL, FRANZ. The Forty Days of Musa Dagh.

G32. SMITH, ADAM. The Wealth of Nations.

G33. COLLI NS.VVILKIE. The Moonstone and The Woman in White.

G34. NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH. The Philosophy of Nietzsche.

G3C BURY, J. B. A History of Greece.

G36. DOSTOYEVSKY. FYODOR. The Brothers Karamazov.

G37. THE COMPLETE NOVELS AND SELECTED TALES OF
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

G38. ROLLAND, ROMAIN. Jean-Christophe.

G39. THE BASIC WRITINGS OF SIGMUND FREUD.

G4c THE COMPLETE TALES AND POEMS OF EDGAR
ALLAN POE.

G4i. FARRELL, JAMES T. Studs Lonigan.

G42. THE POEMS AND PLAYS OF TENNYSON.

G43. DEWEY, JOHN. Intelligence in the Modern World: John
Dewey's Philosophy.

G44. DOS PASSOS, JOHN. U. S. A.

GAS- LEWISOHN, LUDWIG. The Story of American Literature.

G46. A NEW ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POETRY.

G47. THE ENGLISH PHILOSOPHERS FROM BACON TO
MILL.

G48. THE METROPOLITAN OPERA GUIDE.

G49. TWAIN, MARK. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

G50. WHITMAN, WALT. Leaves of Grass.

Go. THE BEST-KNOWN NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT.

G52. JOYCE, JAMES. Ulysses.

G53. SUE, EUGENE. The Wandering Jew.

G54. FIELDING, HENRY. Tom Jones.

G55. O'NEILL, EUGENE. Nine Plays by

G56. STERNE, LAURENCE. Tristram Shandy and A Senti-
mental Journey

G57. BROOKS, VAN WYCK. The Flowering of New England.

G<8. THE COMPLETE NOVELS OF JANE AUSTEN

G59. HEMINGWAY, ERNEST. The Short Stories of

G60. DOSTOYEVSKY, FYODOR. The Idiot. (Illustrated by
Boardman Robinson).

G61. SPAETH, SIGMUND. A Guide to Great Orchestral Music.

G62. THY POEMS, PROSE AND PLAYS OF PUSHKIN.

G63. SIXTEEN FAMOUS BRITISH PLAYS.

G64. MLLYILLE, HERMAN. Mobv Dick

G6',. THE COMPLETE WORKS OF RABELAIS

G6f . THREE FAMOUS MURDER NOVELS
He/ore the Fact, Francis lies.
Trent's iMst Case, E. C. Bentley.
The House of the Arrow, A. E. W. Mason.

G67. ANTHOLOGY OF FAMOUS ENGLISH AND AMERI-
CAN POETRY.

&*.. THE SELECTED WORK OF TOM PAINE

tj',9. ONE HUNDRED AND ONE YEARS' ENTERTAIN-
MENT.

G70. THE COMPLETE POETRY OF JOHN DONNE AND
WILLIAM BLAKE.

G71. SIXTEEN FAMOUS EUROPEAN PLAYS

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